[R] Can this be vectorized?

[Marc Feldesman]

I want to produce some boxplots (and qqnorm plots) for each of a series of 
groups.  It is easy to produce the boxplots or qqplots by groups using 
either by() or tapply(), but the moment that I want unique labels for each 
boxplot, I seem to be stuck using a for loop to achieve the effect.

For example:

tapply(fstat$femur, fstat$race, boxplot)
by(fstat$femur, fstat$race, boxplot)

gives nicely unlabelled boxplots.

but I'm struggling with how to pass the labelling arguments to either 
tapply or by:

e.g.

tapply(fstat$femur, fstat$race, function(x) boxplot(x, main=????))

(nothing obvious comes to mind here that extracts the levels of fstat$race

but:

for (i in 1:3) {
boxplot(fstat[as.numeric(fstat$race)==i, "femur"], main=levels(fstat$race)[i])
}

gives exactly what I want.

It probably isn't worth the effort to avoid the loop above, but curiosity 
compels me to ask whether there is a way to vectorize the extraction of the 
levels from within an apply, tapply, by....?

Thanks.




=====================
Dr. Marc R. Feldesman
Professor and Chairman
Anthropology Department
Portland State University
1721 SW Broadway
Portland, Oregon 97201
email:  feldesmanm at pdx.edu
phone:  503-725-3081
fax:    503-725-3905
http://web.pdx.edu/~h1mf
PGP Key Available On Request
======================

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.
If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people
for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of
power."   P.J. O'Rourke

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