I've found R's ifelse statements to be pretty handy from time to time. For example:
ifelse(TRUE,1,2)
# [1] 1
ifelse(FALSE,1,2)
# [1] 2
But I'm somewhat confused by the following behavior.
ifelse(TRUE,c(1,2),c(3,4))
# [1] 1
ifelse(FALSE,c(1,2),c(3,4))
# [1] 3
Is this a design choice that's above my paygrade?
Here is an approach similar to that suggested by Cath, but it can work with existing pre-assigned vectors
It is based around using the get() like so:
a <- c(1,2)
b <- c(3,4)
get(ifelse(TRUE, "a", "b"))
# [1] 1 2
In your case, using if_else from dplyr would have been helpful: if_else is more strict than ifelse, and throws an error for your case:
library(dplyr)
if_else(TRUE,c(1,2),c(3,4))
#> `true` must be length 1 (length of `condition`), not 2
Found on everydropr:
ifelse(rep(TRUE, length(c(1,2))), c(1,2),c(3,4))
#>[1] 1 2
Can replicate the result of your condition to return the desired length