[R] functions and strings

[Robin Hankin]

Hello everyone

I know it looks like I'm making heavy weather of this, but
I don't think I communicated my problem properly.  I really
appreciate you guys' help here.

I am writing a wrapper for a mathematical library to
which I want to send character strings that it can execute,
and then pass the answer back to R.

Now, I want a user to be able to type _any_ function
and _any_ string.  For example:

f <- function(i){sin(i) + cos(sin(i^2))}
string <- "tti"

and then I want a function do() such that do(f,string) will return

"sin(tti) + cos(sin(tti^2))"

without worrying about whether f()'s arguments include or
do not include a particular letter, and without insisting that "i"
always appears as "(i)" .

Although thinking about it, it's not
actually that bad to require the user to use some otherwise
rare sequence of letters, say "XxX" as
an argument, and then Dmitris's first method would work.

Having said that, this is not an ideal solution
and it would be nicer to have some method that could detect
what the argument to f() is, where it is in the body, and substitute
those occurences for "string".

I want a method  that is perfectly general; I posted my
example of abcd...z(), not to be annoying and pedantic
but to illustrate that a simple gsub approach wouldn't work:
one has to know in advance which letters can and cannot
be used, and this information isn't available.

I don't have a function so named (yet ;-).


best wishes

rksh

>
> Hi Dmitris, Thierry,
>
> I'm getting there but it's still not quite right if f() includes
> something like x^2:
>
> f <- function(x){exp(x^2)}
>>>
>
> gsub("(x)", "(xyz)", deparse(body(f))[2], fixed = TRUE)
>
>
> [1] "    x^2"
>
> [I don't care about the spaces]
>
>
>
> also,
>
>   I can't quite see how to implement Thierry's suggestion about
> changing the letter "x" into a letter that does not occur in f(),
> because of the
> following example:
>
>   f <- function(x){abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz(x^2)}
>
>
>
>
> On 13 Sep 2006, at 09:08, Dimitris Rizopoulos wrote:
>
>> yes you're right, maybe this is better
>>
>>> f <- function(x){sin(x)+exp(x)}
>>> strng <- gsub("(x)", "(xyz)", deparse(body(f))[2], fixed = TRUE)
>>> sub('^[[:space:]]+', '', strng)
>> [1] "sin(xyz) + exp(xyz)"
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Dimitris
>>
>

--
Robin Hankin
Uncertainty Analyst
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton
European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK
  tel  023-8059-7743