Sunday, March 27, 2016

Trick to append an object of class "phylo" to a "multiPhylo" object

I forgot about this trick. Objects of class "phylo" and "multiPhylo" have S3 combine methods; however when we want to append a object of class "phylo" to an object of class "multiPhylo" we run into a problem.

So for instance:

library(ape)
t1<-rtree(n=20)
t2<-rtree(n=20)
obj<-c(t1,t2)
obj
## 2 phylogenetic trees
## no problem!
## or
t1<-rmtree(n=20,N=10)
t2<-rmtree(n=100,N=2)
obj<-c(t1,t2)
obj
## 12 phylogenetic trees
## no problem!
## however:
t1<-rmtree(n=20,N=10)
t2<-rtree(n=20)
obj<-c(t1,t2)
## Error in `[<-.multiPhylo`(`*tmp*`, a:N, value = structure(list(edge = structure(c(21L, : at least one element in 'value' is not of class "phylo".
## doesn't work

A workaround that is not too hard is to make the "phylo" a "multiPhylo" object with one tree only, as follows:

t2<-list(t2)
class(t2)<-"multiPhylo"
t2
## 1 phylogenetic trees
obj<-c(t1,t2)
obj
## 11 phylogenetic trees
## works!

3 comments:

  1. This blog post title is a slight rewrite from clickbait fodder. All you needed to do was make it "This One Weird Trick to append an object of class "phylo" to a "multiPhylo" object!"

    All joking aside, this trick is very useful...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, I think 'I tried to combine an object of class "multiPhylo" with one of class "phylo" and you won't believe what happened next....'

      Delete

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