I am trying to write a function that generates a vector of strings, each of which is evaluated as an expression in a global environment. The problem is that eval (parse (text = x)) evaluates only inside the function environment.
As a hypothetical example, let's say that I want to replace the values โโof several variables with NA, but only if they are below a certain cutoff value.
set.seed(200)
df <- as.data.frame(matrix(runif(25), nrow=5, ncol=5))
df
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
1 0.5337724 0.83929374 0.4543649 0.3072981 0.46036069
2 0.5837650 0.71160009 0.6492529 0.5667674 0.09874701
3 0.5895783 0.09650122 0.1537271 0.1317879 0.20659381
4 0.6910399 0.52382473 0.6492887 0.9221776 0.92233983
5 0.6673315 0.23535054 0.3832137 0.6463296 0.31942681
cutoff.V1 <- 0.9
cutoff.V2 <- 0.5
cutoff.V3 <- 0.1
cutoff.V4 <- 0.7
cutoff.V5 <- 0.4
Instead of copying and pasting the same line over and over, changing the same text in each line ...
df$V1[df$V1 < cutoff.V1] <- NA
df$V2[df$V2 < cutoff.V2] <- NA
df$V3[df$V3 < cutoff.V3] <- NA
df$V4[df$V4 < cutoff.V4] <- NA
df$V5[df$V5 < cutoff.V5] <- NA
... I'm trying to make R for me:
vars <- c("V1", "V2", "V3", "V4", "V5")
variable.queue <- function(vec, placeholder, command) {
x <- vector()
for(i in 1:length(vec)) {
x[i] <- gsub(placeholder, vec[i], command)
}
return(x)
}
commands <- variable.queue(vars, "foo", "df$foo[df$foo < cutoff.foo] <- NA")
for(i in 1:length(commands)) {eval(parse(text=commands[i]))}
df
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
1 NA 0.8392937 0.4543649 NA 0.4603607
2 NA 0.7116001 0.6492529 NA NA
3 NA NA 0.1537271 NA NA
4 NA 0.5238247 0.6492887 0.9221776 0.9223398
5 NA NA 0.3832137 NA NA
commands
[1] "df$V1[df$V1 < cutoff.V1] <- NA" "df$V2[df$V2 < cutoff.V2] <- NA" "df$V3[df$V3 < cutoff.V3] <- NA"
[4] "df$V4[df$V4 < cutoff.V4] <- NA" "df$V5[df$V5 < cutoff.V5] <- NA"
This solution works, but I want to put the last INSIDE function for the loop. Any ideas?
Edit: Thanks, Kevin. Here's the "functional" version (bwahaha, I just can't help myself sometimes):
variable.queue <- function(vec, placeholder, command) {
x <- vector()
for(i in 1:length(vec)) {
x[i] <- gsub(placeholder, vec[i], command)
}
for(i in 1:length(x)) {
eval(parse(text=x[i]), envir= .GlobalEnv)
}
}
variable.queue(vars, "foo", "df$foo[df$foo < cutoff.foo] <- NA")