/lazyeval

A strategy for doing non-standard evaluation (NSE) in R

Primary LanguageR

lazyeval

Build Status

The lazyeval package provides the tools necessary to do non-standard evaluation (NSE) "right" in R. There are three principles:

  • Instead of using substitute(), use lazyeval::lazy() to capture both the expression and the environment associated with a function argument (aka promise). Or use lazyeval::lazy_dots(...) to capture all the promises in ....

  • Every function that uses NSE should have a SE partner with a name that ends in _. This function should do all the work. The NSE function should look something like this:

    # If only y needs NSE
    f <- function(x, y) {
      f_(x, lazyeval::lazy(y))
    }

    If needed, make the SE version generic, not the NSE version.

  • Inside the SE function, use lazyeval::make_call() or lazyeval::lazy_eval() to evalute the expression in the right context.

See the vignette("lazyeval") for more details.

Installation

To install:

devtools::install_github("hadley/lazyeval")