passing a vector of variable names to the ... pairlist function argument

Thanks - your last suggestion does seem to work with the ridge function,
but the names of the objects get lost in the process. Is there a way to
keep the object names with get?

Thanks,
Jessica Myers

On Apr 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:

On 21.04.2011 16:03, Jessica Myers wrote:

Hi,

I have a character vector that contains the names of several objects
that I would like to pass to a function (specifically, the ridge
function in the survival package, but cbind is a similar example). I've
been struggling with how to do this so that the object values get
interpreted by the function, rather than the object names.

For example,
x1 <- 1:4
x2 <- 2:5
x3 <- 3:6
xs <- c("x1", "x2", "x3")

If I wanted to cbind(x1, x2, x3) without typing this out, how would I do
it?

For the cbind case, I'd omit cbind and ask R to:

sapply(xs, get)

or

apply(matrix(xs), 1, get)

or with cbind():

do.call("cbind", lapply(xs, get))

the latter can be generalized for other function calls, of course.

Best,
Uwe Ligges

Thanks very much!

Jessica Myers
Instructor in Medicine
Division of Pharmacoepidemiology
Brigham and Women's Hospital



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