[R] do.call invoking a function with multiple arguments

[Eric Lecoutre]

Hi users,

I am not sure to understand the help page about do.call.

--
  do.call(what, args)
     args: a _list_ of arguments to the function call.  The 'names'
           attribute of 'args' gives the argument names.
--

If we take the following sample data:


 > (tab=as.data.frame(table(factor(1:10))))
    Var1 Freq
1     1    1
2     2    1
3     3    1
4     4    1
5     5    1
6     6    1
7     7    1
8     8    1
9     9    1
10   10    1

I can call "paste" on it:

 > do.call("paste",tab)
  [1] "1 1"  "2 1"  "3 1"  "4 1"  "5 1"  "6 1"  "7 1"  "8 1"  "9 1"  "10 1"

Now if I want to use ":" as the separator, I guess I should write

 > do.call("paste",list(tab,sep=":"))
[1] "c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)" "c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)"

which does not return me what I want.
Of course, I know there are plenty other ways to achieve my goal but this 
is not the first case I encounter I cant' use "do.call" though I think it 
should be possible.

Could someone bring me an example of such a use?
basically, my needs are:

do.call("foo",args) args containing primary and extra-arguments to pass to 
"foo".

Best wishes,

Eric


Eric Lecoutre
UCL /  Institut de Statistique
Voie du Roman Pays, 20
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium

tel: (+32)(0)10473050
lecoutre at stat.ucl.ac.be
http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ISpersonnel/lecoutre

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. -Edward 
Tufte