Thank you all for replying so quickly. @Jim You are right, I ran into that. You can see as.character() being called to remedy the situation you described. I dropped the factors from the data frame in a line outside the function. Creating the dataframe with stringsAsFactors = F is the easiest way to go. Tks.
@Thomas, @Jeremiah R really creates a copy and forgets the reference. That was clearly visible in the debugger. In an earlier version of this I was returning a list of the compute values. I will go back to that. Tks a lot for helping me with this. Bernardo Doré > > On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 2:09 PM, Bernardo Doré <berd...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hello list, >> >> my first post but I've been using this list as a help source for a while. >> Couldn't live without it. >> >> I am writing a function that takes a dataframe as an argument and in the >> end I intend to assign the result of some computation back to the >> dataframe. This is what I have so far: >> >> myFunction <- function(x){ >> y <- x[1,1] >> z <- strsplit(as.character(y), split = " ") >> if(length(z[[1]] > 1)){ >> predictedWord <- z[[1]][length(z[[1]])] >> z <- z[[1]][-c(length(z[[1]]))] >> z <- paste(z, collapse = " ") >> } >> x[1,1] <- z >> } >> >> And lets say I create my dataframe like this: >> test <- data.frame(var1=c("a","b","c"),var2=c("d","e","f")) >> >> and then call >> myFunction(test) >> >> The problem is when I assign x[1,1] to y in the first operation inside the >> function, x becomes a dataframe inside the function scope and loses the >> reference to the dataframe "test" passed as argument. In the end when I >> assign z to what should be row 1 and column 1 of the "test" dataframe, it >> assigns to x inside the function scope and no modification is made on >> "test". >> >> I hope the problem statement is clear. >> >> Thank you, >> >> Bernardo Doré >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posti >> ng-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.