It's easiest to see what's going on if you use eval.quoted directly: eval.quoted(.(cyl), mtcars) eval.quoted(.("cyl"), mtcars) eval.quoted(.(as.name("cyl")), mtcars)
But you shouldn't need to do any syntactic hackery because the default method automatically parses the string for you: eval.quoted(as.quoted("cyl"), mtcars) Hadley On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Sunny Srivastava <research.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Hadley: > I was trying to use ddply using the format . (var1) for splitting. > I thought . ( as.name(grp) ) would do the same thing. But it does not. I was > just trying to know my mistake. I am sorry if it is a basic question. > Thank you and others for your reply. > Best Regards, > S. > > On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Hadley Wickham <had...@rice.edu> wrote: >> >> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Sunny Srivastava >> <research.b...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Dear R-Helpers: >> > >> > I am using trying to use *ddply* to extract min and max of a particular >> > column in a data.frame. I am using two different forms of the function: >> > >> > >> > ## var_name_to_split is a string -- something like "var1" which is the >> > name >> > of a column in data.frame >> > >> > ddply( df, .(as.name(var_name_to_split)), function(x) c(min(x[ , 3] , >> > max(x[ >> > , 3]))) ## fails with an error - case 1 >> > ddply( df, var_name_to_split , function(x) c(min(x[ , 3] , max(x[ , >> > 3]))) >> > ## works fine - case 2 >> > >> > I can't understand why I get the error in case 1. Can someone help me >> > please? >> >> Why do you expect case 1 to work? >> >> Hadley >> >> -- >> Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair >> Department of Statistics / Rice University >> http://had.co.nz/ > > -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.