Semantically, R is pass-by-value, so you don't really have the names, just the values. In implementation, though, R *does* pass names, in part at least in order to do "lazy evaluation". You can get them via "substitute" ; see the help for that.
Reid Huntsinger -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Heinz Tuechler Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 11:45 AM To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: [R] How to get variable names in a function? Hello, applying a function to a list of variables I face the following problem: Let's say I want to compute tables for several variables. I could write a command for every single table, like bravo<-c(1,1,2,3,5,5,5,);charly<-c(7,7,4,4,2,1) table(bravo); table(charly) > table(bravo); table(charly) bravo 1 2 3 5 2 1 1 3 charly 1 2 4 7 1 1 2 2 The results are two tables with the names of the variables above each. If I want to do the same thing by a function I find no way to get the variable names above the tables. demofn<-function(varlist) {for (i in seq(along=varlist)) {cat(deparse(varlist[i])) # < - - - - how to change this? print(table(varlist[i]))}} > demofn(list(bravo, charly)) list(c(1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5)) 1 2 3 5 2 1 1 3 list(c(7, 7, 4, 4, 2, 1)) 1 2 4 7 1 1 2 2 > Thanks, Heinz Tüchler ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html