NaN while scrubbing

[fedwiki]

NaN while scrubbing

[WardCunningham]

I started writing code that would show N/A for not-applicable. Then I realized that would be substituting one abbreviation for another. The trouble with NaN is that it is often read as "bug here".

An alternative would be to skip non-numeric columns entirely. This reduces the value of scrubbing for seeing what's there. Another choice would be to treat non-numerics as missing data, which is not quite the same as treating the as zero. The question remains, what to show in big letters when all data is non-numeric.

I suppose the most useful thing would be to explain in the space available what is really present in the column. Perhaps it could shift to a smaller font and say something like "text field, 4.6 avg length".

[paul90]

The issue it causes is in the scatter plugin - when a NaN column is current all the point line-up on the left.

Not sure what is best - probably the consumer plugin needs to ignore values it is not expecting...

[WardCunningham]

Ah. True.