dcast doesn't work with complex numbers in value.var.

[eliocamp]

I might be wrong, but I think that some versions ago data.table was able to handle complex numbers (#3690). In the CRAN version, I see that I can't dcast when value.var points to a complex vector.

library(data.table)

dt <- CJ(x = 1:10, y = letters[1:3])
dt[, z := complex(real = rnorm(.N), imaginary = rnorm(.N))]

dcast(dt, x ~ y, value.var  = "z")
#> Error in dcast.data.table(dt, x ~ y, value.var = "z"): Unsupported column type in fcast val: 'complex'

Expected output:

reshape2::dcast(dt, x ~ y, value.var  = "z")
#>     x                     a                     b                     c
#> 1   1 -1.3488967+1.1481185i -0.5222023-0.3259327i -0.5009616-0.7509642i
#> 2   2 -1.9949708+0.2536504i -1.3369498-0.4085785i  0.2366162+1.8662590i
#> 3   3  0.6624376+0.1975880i  0.5939629+1.0406464i -0.3498065+0.4978450i
#> 4   4 -0.0458679-1.3673610i  0.9238121-1.2469855i -0.4311840-2.3883511i
#> 5   5 -0.2211641+0.7137510i -1.4004275-0.8080942i  1.2348086-0.2340012i
#> 6   6  0.0606991-1.8565303i -0.8888768+0.9388083i  0.3308363+0.1521898i
#> 7   7 -0.6501890-0.6649984i -1.0598468-0.2198247i  1.4283844-0.9732736i
#> 8   8 -0.1287399-0.4475324i -0.3761322-0.0362629i -1.7031317-0.3632172i
#> 9   9  0.0497523+2.0927461i -0.9403378-1.7611338i  1.1598990-0.3927210i
#> 10 10 -1.5632296-1.5896036i -0.5649199+0.0777556i  0.0734752-1.4180248i

^{Created on 2020-12-18 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

Session info

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[MichaelChirico]

I did think this was supported, but it never was; checked against versions 1.12.{4,6,8}, 1.13.{0,6} and HEAD.

[MichaelChirico]

@eliocamp implemented in #4863 if you need it urgently

[eliocamp]

Thanks!

No urgency. I just used reshape2::dcast() for now.