R – How to concatenate String and an output evaluated from a function in R

rstatistics

Basically, I have the following say:

counter <- 3
k <- 9999

I would like to get R to print the following:

on the 3rd count: 9999

Does anyone what command should I use to do this? Please spell it out for me ,as I am completely new to R.

Best Answer

The basic construction is

paste("on the ", counter, "rd count: ", k, sep="")

You'll have to be a little clever to choose the right suffix for the digit (i.e. "rd" after 3, "th" after 4-9, etc. Here's a function to do it:

suffixSelector <- function(x) {
  if (x%%10==1) {
    suffixSelector <- "st"
  } else if(x%%10==2) {
    suffixSelector <- "nd"
  } else if(x%%10==3) {
    suffixSelector <- "rd"
  } else {
    suffixSelector <- "th"
  }

}

Thus:

suffix <- suffixSelector(counter)
paste("on the ", counter, suffix, " count: ", k, sep="")

You need to set the sep argument because by default paste inserts a blank space in between strings.

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R – Workflow for statistical analysis and report writing

I generally break my projects into 4 pieces:

load.R
clean.R
func.R
do.R

load.R: Takes care of loading in all the data required. Typically this is a short file, reading in data from files, URLs and/or ODBC. Depending on the project at this point I'll either write out the workspace using save() or just keep things in memory for the next step.

clean.R: This is where all the ugly stuff lives - taking care of missing values, merging data frames, handling outliers.

func.R: Contains all of the functions needed to perform the actual analysis. source()'ing this file should have no side effects other than loading up the function definitions. This means that you can modify this file and reload it without having to go back an repeat steps 1 & 2 which can take a long time to run for large data sets.

do.R: Calls the functions defined in func.R to perform the analysis and produce charts and tables.

The main motivation for this set up is for working with large data whereby you don't want to have to reload the data each time you make a change to a subsequent step. Also, keeping my code compartmentalized like this means I can come back to a long forgotten project and quickly read load.R and work out what data I need to update, and then look at do.R to work out what analysis was performed.

R – How to assign from a function which returns more than one value

(1) list[...]<- I had posted this over a decade ago on r-help. Since then it has been added to the gsubfn package. It does not require a special operator but does require that the left hand side be written using list[...] like this:

library(gsubfn)  # need 0.7-0 or later
list[a, b] <- functionReturningTwoValues()

If you only need the first or second component these all work too:

list[a] <- functionReturningTwoValues()
list[a, ] <- functionReturningTwoValues()
list[, b] <- functionReturningTwoValues()

(Of course, if you only needed one value then functionReturningTwoValues()[[1]] or functionReturningTwoValues()[[2]] would be sufficient.)

See the cited r-help thread for more examples.

(2) with If the intent is merely to combine the multiple values subsequently and the return values are named then a simple alternative is to use with :

myfun <- function() list(a = 1, b = 2)

list[a, b] <- myfun()
a + b

# same
with(myfun(), a + b)

(3) attach Another alternative is attach:

attach(myfun())
a + b

ADDED: with and attach

Best Answer

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R – Workflow for statistical analysis and report writing

R – How to assign from a function which returns more than one value

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