A Simple S3 Class for Representing Vectors of Binary Data ('BLOBS')

R's raw vector is useful for storing a single binary object. What if you want to put a vector of them in a data frame? The 'blob' package provides the blob object, a list of raw vectors, suitable for use as a column in data frame.

The goal of blob is to provide a simple S3 class to represent a vector of binary objects, aka blobs. The blob class is a lightweight wrapper around a list of raw vectors, suitable for inclusion in a data frame.

In most cases you will not need to use this package explicitly: it will be used transparently by packages that need to load BLOB columns from databases or binary file formats.

Installation

You can install blob from github with:

devtools::install_github("tidyverse/blob")

Example

To create a blob, use blob(), new_blob() or as.blob():

x1 <- charToRaw("Good morning")
x2 <- as.raw(c(0x48, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f))
 
new_blob(list(x1, x2))
#> [1] blob[12 B] blob[5 B]
blob(x1, x2)
#> [1] blob[12 B] blob[5 B]
 
as.blob(c("Good morning", "Good evening"))
#> [1] blob[12 B] blob[12 B]