[Rd] the pipe |> and line breaks in pipelines

[Timothy Goodman]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 1:03 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
wrote:  Then I could run any number of lines with pipes at the

> > start and no special character at the end, and have it treated as a
> > single pipeline.  I suppose that'd need to be a feature offered by the
> > environment (RStudio's RNotebooks in my case).  I could wrap my
> > pipelines in parentheses (to make the "pipes at start of line" syntax
> > valid R code), and then could use the hypothetical "submit selected code
> > ignoring line-breaks" feature when running just the first part of the
> > pipeline -- i.e., selecting full lines, but starting after the opening
> > paren so as not to need to insert a closing paren.
>
> I think I don't understand your workflow enough to comment on this.
>
> Duncan
>
>
>
What I mean is, I could add parentheses as suggested to let me put the
pipes at the start of the line, like this:

    (                                  # Line 1
        my_data_frame                  # Line 2
        |> filter(some_condition)      # Line 3
        |> group_by(some_column)       # Line 4
        |> summarize(some_functions)   # Line 5
    )                                  # Line 6

If this gives me an unexpected result, I might want to re-run just up
through line 3 and check the output, to see if something is wrong with the
"filter" (e.g., my condition matched less data than expected).  Ideally, I
could do this without changing the code, by just selecting lines 2 and 3
and pressing Ctrl+Enter (my environment's shortcut for "run selected
code").  But it wouldn't work, because without including the parentheses
these lines would be treated as two separate expressions, the second of
which is invalid since it starts with a pipe.  Alternatively, I could
include line 1 in my selection (along with lines 2 and 3), but it wouldn't
work without having to type a new closing parenthesis after line 3, and
then delete it afterwards.  Or, I could select and comment out lines 4 and
5, and then select and run all 6 lines.  But none of those are as
convenient as just being able to select and run lines 2 and 3 (which is
what I'm used to being able to do in several other languages which support
pipelines).  And though it may seem a minor annoyance, when I'm working a
lot with dplyr code I find myself wanting to do something like this many
times per day.

What *would* work well would be if I could write the code as above, but
then when I want to select and re-run just lines 2 and 3, I would use some
keyboard shortcut that meant "pass this code to the parser as a single
line, with line breaks (and comments) removed".  Then it would be run like
    my_data_frame |> filter(some_condition)
instead of producing an error.  That'd require the environment I'm using --
RStudio -- to support this feature, but wouldn't require any change to how
R is parsed.  From the replies here, I'm coming around to thinking that'd
be the better option.

- Tim

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