[R] Passing a string variable to Surv

[Vincenzo Forgetta]

Hi,

    I am trying to write a function to automate multiple graph
generation. My data looks like:

Table of numeric values with the following headers:


      timeM1  statusM1 xM1 timeM2  statusM2 xM2 timeM3  statusM3 xM3
1
2
3
4
5
6

Where M1,M2, M3 hve no similarity except they have a max string length
of 7. Examples are mcw0045, adl0003, lei0101.

Now, what I want to do is

Function(M1, M2, M3, datafile)
{
    xnew <- readtable(datafile)
    name1 <- paste("time",M1",sep"")
    name2 <- paste(status",M1,sep"")
    name3 <- paste("x",M1,sep"")
    fit1 <- survfit(Surv(name1,name2)~name3,data=xnew)
    .
    .
    repeat for M2 and M3
    .
    .
    par(mfcol=c(1,3))
    plot(fit1)
    plot(fit2)
    plot(fit3)
}

When I try to pass name1 into the Surv function it give the following
error message:

> fit <- survfit(Surv(name1,status)~x,data=xnew)
Error in Surv(name1, status) : Time variable is not numeric

I think it is no doing what I want it to do. How to I tell the function
Surv to pass the value of name2 as a string?


Thanks



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