[R] lapply drops colnames

[Liaw, Andy]

Seems like you got your input and output mixed up a bit...

> From: Jack Tanner
> 
> I want to iterate over a data frame by columns, and as I'm processing 
> each column I want to know its column name.
> 
>  > a <- as.data.frame(list(1,2,3))
>  > colnames(a) <- c("a", "b", "c")
>  > colnames(a)

You must have the two lines above reversed, for the output you get below
suggests so.

> [1] "X1" "X2" "X3"


>  > lapply(a, function(x) {print(colnames(x))})
> NULL
> NULL
> NULL
> $a
> NULL
> 
> $b
> NULL
> 
> $c
> NULL

What happened is, essentially:

for (i in seq(along=a)) {
    print(colnames(a[[i]]))
}

so now you see what's wrong: colnames() of any columns in `a' is NULL,
because a single column of `a' is no longer a data frame, and thus has no
colnames.  So R prints `NULL' three times.  The final output is from
lapply(), which is a list with the same names as the input list, but the
components having values of the function being lapply()'ed: NULL.

Andy
 
> What is lapply doing? Why does it drop the column name of 
> every column 
> it's iterating over? How can I get the column name as a string?
> 
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