[R] passing a vector of variable names to the ... pairlist function argument

[Jessica Myers]

Thanks - your last suggestion does seem to work with the ridge  
function, but the names of the objects get lost in the process.  Is  
there a way to keep the object names with get?

Thanks,
Jessica Myers

On Apr 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:

>
>
> On 21.04.2011 16:03, Jessica Myers wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a character vector that contains the names of several objects
>> that I would like to pass to a function (specifically, the ridge
>> function in the survival package, but cbind is a similar example).  
>> I've
>> been struggling with how to do this so that the object values get
>> interpreted by the function, rather than the object names.
>>
>> For example,
>> x1 <- 1:4
>> x2 <- 2:5
>> x3 <- 3:6
>> xs <- c("x1", "x2", "x3")
>>
>> If I wanted to cbind(x1, x2, x3) without typing this out, how would  
>> I do
>> it?
>
>
> For the cbind case, I'd omit cbind and ask R to:
>
>  sapply(xs, get)
>
> or
>
>  apply(matrix(xs), 1, get)
>
> or with cbind():
>
>  do.call("cbind", lapply(xs, get))
>
> the latter can be generalized for other function calls, of course.
>
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>
>> Thanks very much!
>>
>> Jessica Myers
>> Instructor in Medicine
>> Division of Pharmacoepidemiology
>> Brigham and Women's Hospital
>>
>>
>>
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