R array to RcppArmadillo cube (updated)

A quick post here on how to convert a 3D array from R to the RcppArmadillo cube.

Rcpp does not support arrays yet (only vectors and matrices). However, RcppArmadillo has a proper 3D array class: arma::cube. The conversion can be done via Rcpp::NumericVector. The only aspect of this exercise that surprised me was the fact that Rcpp::NumericVector stores dimensions of an array, but does not allow one to extract this info. Hence, if you don't know in advance the dimensions of your array, the only solution I see is to pass the vector of dimensions to Rcpp together with the array. Not too ugly, but a bit awkward. Thanks to the commenter Eli below, who pointed out that dimensions of the array can be extracted via the .attr() method -- much prettier now. My code to illustrate this concept:

require(inline)
require(RcppArmadillo)
 
src <- '
  using namespace Rcpp;
 
  NumericVector vecArray(myArray);
  IntegerVector arrayDims = vecArray.attr("dim");

 
  arma::cube cubeArray(vecArray.begin(), arrayDims[0], arrayDims[1], arrayDims[2], false);
 
  //change one element in the array/cube
  cubeArray(0,0,0) = 518;  
 
  return(wrap(cubeArray));  
'
 
readCube = cxxfunction(signature(myArray="numeric"),body=src, plugin="RcppArmadillo")

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

A numerical test:

> set.seed(345)
> testArray = array(rnorm(18), dim=c(3,3,2))
> print(testArray)
, , 1
 
           [,1]        [,2]      [,3]
[1,] -0.7849082 -0.29059656 -0.927724
[2,] -0.2795144 -0.06753159  1.710771
[3,] -0.1614579 -0.63352041  1.654769
 
, , 2
 
          [,1]       [,2]       [,3]
[1,]  1.810483 -0.8496292 -1.4029422
[2,]  1.866772  0.3184496  0.5682982
[3,] -1.399833  0.9035913  1.0457561
 
> readCube(testArray)
, , 1
 
            [,1]        [,2]      [,3]
[1,] 518.0000000 -0.29059656 -0.927724
[2,]  -0.2795144 -0.06753159  1.710771
[3,]  -0.1614579 -0.63352041  1.654769
 
, , 2
 
          [,1]       [,2]       [,3]
[1,]  1.810483 -0.8496292 -1.4029422
[2,]  1.866772  0.3184496  0.5682982
[3,] -1.399833  0.9035913  1.0457561

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org