Assessing the name of an object within an argument

Yes, I was too fast there, sorry. I sent a correction right after but must have picked Reply instead of Replay All.

Cheers
Thomas

This is false. formals() gives the FORMAL argument list of the function, not the ACTUAL arguments supplied. That is obtained by the construction

deparse(substitute(dataset))

The OP should consult a good R tutorial for this and other uses of substitute(), part of the "computing on the language" functionality of R.

Bert

You can get that using `formals()`.

my_func <- function(dataset = iris)
{
  #print(dataset) # here I do not want to print the dataset but the name
  # of the object - iris in this case - instead

  print(formals()$dataset) # this is what you want
}

This gives you what the arguments were as an alist. It won?t always be a name, of course, but when it is, as in this case, that will be a symbol you can print.

Cheers
        Thomas

Hi All,

I have a function like

my_func <- function(dataset)
{
some operation
}

Now I would like not only to operate on the dataset (how this is done is
obvious) but I would like to get the name of the dataset handed over as an
argument.

Example:

my_func <- function(dataset = iris)
{
print(dataset) # here I do not want to print the dataset but the name
of the object - iris in this case - instead
# quote() does not do the trick cause it prints "dataset" instead of
"iris"
# as.name<http://as.name>() gives an error saying that the object can not coerced to a
symbol
}

Is there a way to do this?

Kind regards

Georg

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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.