[R] How to get the function names

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Probably the best you can hope for is to cover
most cases.  This one uses match.call and handles
a number of cases and perhaps if you spend more time
on it might be able to add some cases where it fails
such as the second L below:

f <- function(x) {
	if (!is.list(x)) x <- list(x)
	if (is.null(names(x))) names(x) <- ""
	names(x)[names(x) == ""] <- NA
	mc <- match.call()[-1][[1]]
	if (length(mc) > 1) mc <- mc[-1]
	ifelse(is.na(names(x)), as.character(mc), names(x))
}

f(c(a = mean))
f(list(a = mean, b = sd))
f(c(f = function(x)x*x))
f(list(f = function(x)x*x, function(x)1-x))
L <- list(a = mean, b = sd)
f(L)
L <- list(a = mean, function(x)x)
f(L)

f(mean)
f(list(a = mean, sd))
f(list(mean, sd))
f(function(x)x*x)
f(list(function(x)x*x, function(y)y-1))


On 10/5/06, Søren Højsgaard <Soren.Hojsgaard at agrsci.dk> wrote:
> I've defined the function
>
> getFunNames <- function(FUN){
>  if (!is.list(FUN))
>    fun.names <- paste(deparse(substitute(FUN)), collapse = " ")
>  else
>    fun.names <- unlist(lapply(substitute(FUN)[-1], function(a) paste(a)))
>  fun.names
> }
>
> which gives what I want :
> > getFunNames(mean)
> [1] "mean"
> > getFunNames(ff)
> [1] "ff"
> > getFunNames(c(mean,ff))
> [1] "mean" "ff"
>
> If I call this within a function, things go wrong:
> 1] "FUN"
> > foo(ff)
> [1] "FUN"
> > foo(c(mean,ff))
> Error in substitute(FUN)[-1] : object is not subsettable
>
> Obviously there are some things (quite a few things) which I have not understood. Can anyone help?
> Thanks
> Søren
>
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