Error in <my code> : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable

Question

I was finally able to work out the code for my scraping. It seemed to be working fine and then all of a sudden when I ran it again, I got the following error message:

Error in url[i] = paste("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/", gsub(" ", "_",  : 
  object of type 'closure' is not subsettable

I am not sure why as I changed nothing in my code.

Please advise.

library(XML)
library(plyr)

names <- c("George Clooney", "Kevin Costner", "George Bush", "Amar Shanghavi")

for(i in 1:length(names)) {
    url[i] = paste('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/', gsub(" ","_", names[i]) , sep="")

    # some parsing code
}

Answer 1

In general this error message means that you have tried to use indexing on a function. You can reproduce this error message with, for example

mean[1]
## Error in mean[1] : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable
mean[[1]]
## Error in mean[[1]] : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable
mean$a
## Error in mean$a : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable

The closure mentioned in the error message is (loosely) the function and the environment that stores the variables when the function is called.

---

In this specific case, as Joshua mentioned, you are trying to access the url function as a variable. If you define a variable named url, then the error goes away.

As a matter of good practise, you should usually avoid naming variables after base-R functions. (Calling variables data is a common source of this error.)

---

There are several related errors for trying to subset operators or keywords.

`+`[1]
## Error in `+`[1] : object of type 'builtin' is not subsettable
`if`[1]
## Error in `if`[1] : object of type 'special' is not subsettable

---

If you're running into this problem in shiny, the most likely cause is that you're trying to work with a reactive expression without calling it as a function using parentheses.

library(shiny)
reactive_df <- reactive({
    data.frame(col1 = c(1,2,3),
               col2 = c(4,5,6))
})

While we often work with reactive expressions in shiny as if they were data frames, they are actually functions that return data frames (or other objects).

isolate({
    print(reactive_df())
    print(reactive_df()$col1)
})
  col1 col2
1    1    4
2    2    5
3    3    6
[1] 1 2 3

But if we try to subset it without parentheses, then we're actually trying to index a function, and we get an error:

isolate(
    reactive_df$col1
)
Error in reactive_df$col1 : object of type 'closure' is not subsettable