Getting started

basetable provides a base-style front end for tabular work with a native C++ table engine. The core design goals are explicit semantics, compact naming, and equal support for nested calls and native |> pipelines.

The canonical compact core

Most workflows need only a small set of regular verbs:

Task	Canonical functions
Inspect	`preview()`, `describe()`, `missingness()`
Keep rows	`subset()`
Keep or remove columns	`pick()`, `drop()`
Create columns	`transform()`
Order rows	`orderrows()`
Summarise	`aggregate()`, `summaries()`, `count()`
Join	`merge()`, `antimerge()`, `semimerge()`
Reshape	`tolong()`, `towide()`
Validate	`assertcomplete()`, `assertunique()`, `assertrows()`

These are canonical names, not one layer of aliases among several grammars. Each function accepts a table as its first argument, uses character vectors for column specifications, and returns a bt_table. Those regular rules make pipelines compact for people and make function selection predictable for program-generating tools such as language models.

The package is intentionally focused on in-memory table manipulation, exploration, and validation. Read and write files with base R or a dedicated I/O package, then pass the resulting data frame to basetable. Domain-specific parsing and validation remain the responsibility of focused packages.

subset(mtcars, cyl == 6, select = c("mpg", "hp", "wt"))

## # basetable: 7 x 3
##    mpg  hp    wt
## 1 21.0 110 2.620
## 2 21.0 110 2.875
## 3 21.4 110 3.215
## 4 18.1 105 3.460
## 5 19.2 123 3.440
## 6 17.8 123 3.440
## 7 19.7 175 2.770

mtcars |>
  pick(c("mpg", "hp", "wt", "cyl")) |>
  aggregate(by = "cyl", value = c("mpg", "hp"), fun = mean)

## # basetable: 3 x 3
##   cyl      mpg        hp
## 1   4 26.66364  82.63636
## 2   6 19.74286 122.28571
## 3   8 15.10000 209.21429

Namespaces stay explicit

Compact names intentionally overlap with base R and other table packages. If more than one is attached, qualify the function rather than introducing a new alias or changing grammars mid-pipeline.

mtcars |>
  basetable::subset(cyl == 6) |>
  basetable::pick(c("mpg", "hp", "wt")) |>
  basetable::transform(power = hp / wt)

## # basetable: 7 x 4
##    mpg  hp    wt    power
## 1 21.0 110 2.620 41.98473
## 2 21.0 110 2.875 38.26087
## 3 21.4 110 3.215 34.21462
## 4 18.1 105 3.460 30.34682
## 5 19.2 123 3.440 35.75581
## 6 17.8 123 3.440 35.75581
## 7 19.7 175 2.770 63.17690