(no subject)

Some functions create objects for which extractor functions are written
to pull out some partial result.

I wish to extract partial results from functions without extractor
functions:
for example, to pass a vector of results to another function.

There isn't a general solution to this problem - it's like saying "I'd
like to remove a part from my car engine that doesn't require a special
tool.  How do I do this?"

Specifically, how would I extract just the contingency table from
ftable.

The command str() is your friend for finding how in particular to approach
a problem.  See ?str, then try:

data(Titanic)
zz <- ftable(Titanic)
str(zz)

ftable [1:16, 1:2] 0 118 0 4 0 154 0 13 35 387 ...
 - attr(*, "row.vars")=List of 3
  ..$ Class: chr [1:4] "1st" "2nd" "3rd" "Crew"
  ..$ Sex  : chr [1:2] "Male" "Female"
  ..$ Age  : chr [1:2] "Child" "Adult"
 - attr(*, "col.vars")=List of 1
  ..$ Survived: chr [1:2] "No" "Yes"
 - attr(*, "class")= chr "ftable"

This tells you that the ftable object is a matrix-like structure: [1:16,
1:2] with row and column name attributes.  To strip the attributes, I'd
coerce to a matrix (in this case).

matrix(zz,ncol=ncol(zz))

I'm new at programming in R.

...

Even after looking at V&R S Programming I don't see a general approach.

Get V&R "Modern Applied Statistics with S".  It's more what you need to
learn R/S.  "S Programming" is for when you start seriously programming
(as opposed to using) R/S.  It's not a beginning book at all.

Hope that helps

Jason