[R] Access variables by string

Philipp Rappold philipp.rappold at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 18:15:30 CET 2010


Thanks a lot guys,

looks like there are -as usual- a gazillion options ;))

f = function(x, vars) x[complete.cases(x[vars]),] seems to be the 
most appropriate in my case though.

Best
Philipp


Benilton Carvalho wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Philipp Rappold
> <philipp.rappold at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I have two probably very easy questions:
>>
>> (1) Is there a way to access certain variables by their string-based name
>> representation?
>>
>> Example:
>> numbers <- c("one", "two", "three")
>> varname <- "numbers"
>> print(varname[2])
> 
> print(get(varname)[2])
> 
>> (2) I need this functionality for a customized na.exclude() function that I
>> am building, which should only exclude rows that have NA in certain columns.
>> Maybe there is already a function which does exactly what I need, so I'd
>> highly appreciate if someone could point me there ;)
>>
>> My current implementation looks like this:
>>
>> naexlcude <- function(data, varnames)
>> {
>>        for(v in varnames){
>>                data = subset(data, !is.na(v))
>>        }
>>
>>        data
>> }
> 
> f = function(x, vars) x[complete.cases(x[vars]),]
> 
> b
> 
>> Best
>> Philipp
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>



More information about the R-help mailing list