[R] passing variable names to dplyr

Bos, Roger roger.bos at rothschild.com
Mon Jan 27 16:45:45 CET 2014


All,

I would like to figure out how to pass variable names to the dplyr function mutate.  For example, this works because hp is one of the variable names on mtcars:

mutate(mtcars, scale(hp))

Let's says I want to pass in the target variable instead of hard-coding the name, as follows:

target <- "hp"
mutate(mtcars, scale(target))

That dones't work.  I read somewhere about using lapply, but that suggestion didn't work for me either:

target <- lapply("hp", as.symbol)
mutate(mtcars, scale(target))

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks,

Roger

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