[R] From FAQ 7.21 to a command likeapply(sapply(list(f1,f2,f3),is.na),2,sum)

[Heinz Tuechler]

At 09:32 30.03.2005 +0200, Heinz Tuechler wrote:
>At 16:13 29.03.2005 -0800, Thomas Lumley wrote:
>>On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Heinz Tuechler wrote:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> Last December there was a thread regarding the famous FAQ 7.21 "How can I
>>> turn a string into a variable?" and asking what people want to do with
>>> these strings.
>>> My, certainly trivial application would be as follows:
>>> Assume I have a data.frame containing besides others also the columns f1,
>>> f2, ..., fn and I want to create a command like:
>>> apply(sapply(list(f1,f2,f3),is.na),2,sum)
>>> or
>>> summary(cbind(f1,f2,f3))
>>>
>>> Can I start from paste('f',1:3,sep='') to arrive at the abovementioned
>>> command?
>>
>>No parse,as.name or other complications needed. It's all just indexing. 
>>Suppose your data frame is called dd
>>
>>fs<-paste('f',1:3,sep='')
>>apply(sapply(dd[,fs],is.na),2,sum)
>>summary(dd[,fs])
>>
>> 	-thomas
>>
>>
>Thank you, Thomas, for your answer. I was curious if there was a simple way
>to do this without referring to the data.frame, so that the resulting
>command would correspond in its effect exactly to the abovementioned
examples.
>It's not urgent, but I will try further.
>
>Many thanks
>
>Heinz
>
Continuation:
Maybe not an elegant solution, but it seems to work:
apply(sapply(eval(parse(text=paste('list(',paste('f',1:3,sep='',
collapse=','),')'))) ,is.na),2,sum)
What I missed in my earlier attempts was "collapse=','".

Heinz