any suggestions on the following gratefully welcome, I have a dataframe, which I am subsetting via labels
atpi[, creativity] where (for example) atpi = as.data.frame(matrix(1:50, ncol = 5, nrow = 10)) names(atpi) = c("Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4", "Q5") and creativity = c("Q1", "Q3", "Q4") I want to add an extra column to the dataframe atpi labelled "creativity", which is the rowsum of these 3 columns. My problem is not the rowsum but but the passing of an argument to a function, which is being used for subsetting but also for labelling the rowsum column. I can do a one-off hack for creativity, but I want to generalise this, as I have numerous subsets like creativity) to calculate and some pre-processiing (imputing missing data etc)... so I'm looking for something simple along the lines of scoring = function(x, A){ x[, A] = rowSums(x[, A]) x } where a call such as scoring(atpi, creativity) would produce something along the lines of > atpi Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 creativity 1 1 11 21 31 41 53 2 2 12 22 32 42 56 3 3 13 23 33 43 59 4 4 14 24 34 44 62 5 5 15 25 35 45 65 6 6 16 26 36 46 68 7 7 17 27 37 47 71 8 8 18 28 38 48 74 9 9 19 29 39 49 77 10 10 20 30 40 50 80 Thanks in advance Gary ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.