Chain arithmetic operators in dplyr with %>% pipe

r dplyr piping magrittr
agenis picture agenis · Dec 8, 2014 · Viewed 8.6k times · Source

I would like to understand why, in the the dplyr or magrittr package, and more specifically the chaining function %>% has some trouble with the basic operators +, -, *, and /

Chaining takes the output of previous statement and feeds it as first argument of the next:

1:10 %>% sum
# [55]

Thus how come this doesn't work

1:10 %>%  *2 %>% sum
1:10 %>% .*2 %>% sum

I also found that the following syntax works for adding/substracting, but not multiply or divide. why so?

1:10 %>% +(2) # works OK
1:10 %>% *(2) # nope...

So should I write an anonymous function even to do a *2 operation on my data.frame?

1:10 %>% (function(x) x*2) %>% sum

Thanks, I couldn't find the answer in other SO questions.

Answer

jbaums picture jbaums · Dec 8, 2014

Surround the operators with backticks or quotes, and things should work as expected:

1:10 %>%  `*`(2) %>% sum
# [1] 110

1:10 %>%  `/`(2) %>% sum
# [1] 27.5

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