[R] Outputing dataframe or vector from within a user defined function

[Farrel Buchinsky]

"Uwe Ligges" <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de> wrote in message 
news:43A7C167.4020104 at statistik.uni-dortmund.de...
> Simply speaking, the last value of a function is returned. You can also
> explicitly call return(). You have to assign the value to a new variable
> when you call the function. Example:

I read your explanation and I half get it. However half getting it does not 
help me when I am wanting to split apart a result that has multiple 
components
I am using dgc.genetics from David Clayton but I think a similar thing would 
happen if one were doing any analysis whose output was multiple lines of 
text. For instance the output from a two sample t-test.
For example: How would one do multiple test and send the output to a 
dataframe where every row was another instance of the test and each row 
would have a column for the t value, another column for the df, another 
column for the p-value, another column for the lower limit of the 95% CI, 
another column for the upper limit of the CI and so on.

My preference is that you send me to website where this is explained such as 
the r-wiki.(Looked for it there and could not find it)

Here is my example.
> tdt(Genotype.4766200)
        Transmission/disequilibrium test
Data:   Genotype.4766200

Untransmitted allele frequencies, informative transmissions
and exact P-values

Allele        Frequency     Transmitted   Untransmitted P-value
2                    0.1311          9                      4 
0.267
Warning message:
1 misinheritances in: phase.resolve(g.cs, g.mr, g.fr, as.allele.pair = TRUE, 
allow.ambiguous = (parent ==

I can unclass it and get
> unclass(tdt(Genotype.4766200))
$statistic
Chi-squared test
        1.923077

$parameter
DF
 1

$exact
[1] TRUE

$p.value
Chi-squared test                1                2
       0.1655179        0.2668457        0.2668457

$method
[1] "Transmission/disequilibrium test"

$data.name
[1] "Genotype.4766200"

$allele.frequencies
Allele frequency
        1         2
0.8688525 0.1311475

$informative.transmissions
  Transmitted Untransmitted
1           4             9
2           9             4

Warning message:
1 misinheritances in: phase.resolve(g.cs, g.mr, g.fr, as.allele.pair = TRUE, 
allow.ambiguous = (parent ==


So as you can see, even the different components of the output are still not 
single values.
How does one strip this to single numbers?
I will be moving to lapply or sapply to run the analysis repeatedly over 
6000 times. There will be way too much output to eyeball.

Another correspondent came up with a complicated way of sending printed 
output to a file and then using various string pattern recognition 
functions, to make R determine what was what. But that seems awfully 
inelegant - turning a computer into a human reader with computer processing 
speed.