pass by reference

Think you are missing the point, assigning the value back is the same as
passing by value. This is rather inefficient if you ever have to deal with
large datasets. You dont want to keep having a local copy within the scope
of the function and then copying over the original.

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:25 AM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:

The assign the value back to the object:

data<-data.frame(col1=c(1,2,3,4,5))

getcol2<-function(data){

+     data$col2[data$col1<=2]="L"
+     data  # return value
+ }

data <- getcol2(data)  # save the return value
data

  col1 col2
1    1    L
2    2    L
3    3 <NA>
4    4 <NA>
5    5 <NA>

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:23 PM, Sachinthaka Abeywardana
<sachin.abeywardana at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jim, R,

What you just showed me simply prints out the 2nd column. If you inspect
your original data, it still just has 1 column. So its still passing by
value.

Thanks,
Sachin

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:19 AM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com>
wrote:

You have to return the value of 'data' from the function.  Functions
do not have "side effects".

data<-data.frame(col1=c(1,2,3,4,5))

getcol2<-function(data){

+     data$col2[data$col1<=2]="L"
+     data  # return value
+ }

getcol2(data)

  col1 col2
1    1    L
2    2    L
3    3 <NA>
4    4 <NA>
5    5 <NA>

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Sachinthaka Abeywardana
<sachin.abeywardana at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I want to do the following:

data<-data.frame(col1=c(1,2,3,4,5))

getcol2<-function(data){
    data$col2[data$col1<=2]="L"
}

getcol2(data)

Unfortunately in the above col2 does not appear in the final data. So
how
would you pass this by reference such that you would get it back?

Thanks,
Sachin

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--
Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.

--
Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.