partition table - Page 13

Using list() to extract a data.table inside of a function

- by Nathan VanHoudnos

I must admit that the data.table J syntax confuses me. I am attempting to use list() to extract a subset of a data.table as a data.table object as described in Section 1.4 of the data.table FAQ, but I can't get this behavior to work inside of a function. An example: require(data.table) ## Setup some test data set.seed(1) test.data <- data.table( X = rnorm(10), Y = rnorm(10), Z = rnorm(10) ) setkey(test.data, X) ## Notice that I can subset the data table easily with literal names test.data[, list(X,Y)] ## X Y ## 1: -0.8356286 -0.62124058 ## 2: -0.8204684 -0.04493361 ## 3: -0.6264538 1.51178117 ## 4: -0.3053884 0.59390132 ## 5: 0.1836433 0.38984324 ## 6: 0.3295078 1.12493092 ## 7: 0.4874291 -0.01619026 ## 8: 0.5757814 0.82122120 ## 9: 0.7383247 0.94383621 ## 10: 1.5952808 -2.21469989 I can even write a function that will return a column of the data.table as a vector when passed the name of a column as a character vector: get.a.vector <- function( my.dt, my.column ) { ## Step 1: Convert my.column to an expression column.exp <- parse(text=my.column) ## Step 2: Return the vector return( my.dt[, eval(column.exp)] ) } get.a.vector( test.data, 'X') ## [1] -0.8356286 -0.8204684 -0.6264538 -0.3053884 0.1836433 0.3295078 ## [7] 0.4874291 0.5757814 0.7383247 1.5952808 But I cannot pull a similar trick for list(). The inline comments are the output from the interactive browser() session. get.a.dt <- function( my.dt, my.column ) { ## Step 1: Convert my.column to an expression column.exp <- parse(text=my.column) ## Step 2: Enter the browser to play around browser() ## Step 3: Verity that a literal X works: my.dt[, list(X)] ## << not shown >> ## Step 4: Attempt to evaluate the parsed experssion my.dt[, list( eval(column.exp)] ## Error in `rownames<-`(`*tmp*`, value = paste(format(rn, right = TRUE), (from data.table.example.R@1032mCJ#7) : ## length of 'dimnames' [1] not equal to array extent return( my.dt[, list(eval(column.exp))] ) } get.a.dt( test.data, "X" ) What am I missing? Update: Due to some confusion as to why I would want to do this I wanted to clarify. My use case is when I need to access a data.table column when when I generate the name. Something like this: set.seed(2) test.data[, X.1 := rnorm(10)] which.column <- 'X' new.column <- paste(which.column, '.1', sep="") get.a.dt( test.data, new.column ) Hopefully that helps.

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