Creating attributes

Unknown

I am trying to create an attribute with existing variables containing hyphens.

ex: a-1

However, when I try to use the AttributeConstructor in conjunction with this variable name, it misinterprets this as the variable a (nonexistent) subtracted by 1.

I have worked around this by using the Attribute renaming facility, however this is proving cumbersome as 120 of my 154 variables contain hyphens.

Is there an easier way to encapsulate a variable name containing ambiguous characters such as the hyphen?

Thanks,

- Pat

IngoRM

Hello Pat,

in RM 4.4 there is a new operator called "ChangeAttributeNamesReplace" which can be used to replace all non-word characters (regular expression for replace_what is '\W') by an empty string or for example an underscore (replace_by could be "_"). If you apply this operator to all attributes (regular expression for the attribute names parameter would be ".*") then you end up with attribute names which can be used by the AttributeConstruction operator.

Hope that helps,
Ingo

haddock

Just like this...

<operator name="Root" class="Process" expanded="yes">
    <operator name="ExampleSetGenerator" class="ExampleSetGenerator">
        <parameter key="number_examples"	value="200"/>
        <parameter key="number_of_attributes"	value="2"/>
        <parameter key="target_function"	value="random"/>
    </operator>
    <operator name="ChangeAttributeName" class="ChangeAttributeName">
        <parameter key="new_name"	value="X-1"/>
        <parameter key="old_name"	value="att1"/>
    </operator>
    <operator name="ChangeAttributeNamesReplace" class="ChangeAttributeNamesReplace">
        <parameter key="apply_on_special"	value="false"/>
        <parameter key="attributes"	value="X.*"/>
        <parameter key="replace_by"	value="_"/>
        <parameter key="replace_what"	value="\-"/>
    </operator>
</operator>