passing column name without quotation marks to user defined function to work with NAs in R

user_16354132 0
Viewed 40

my function is going to take data and column name from user.
column name must be passed only like : column or my column (ie, no "" s only backticks if column name is multi words)

at part of my function I need to check for missing values in that column and replace them with "missed". 

myfun <- function(data, column){
  library(tidyverse)
  data <- as.tibble(data)
  data %>%
    mutate(across(.cols = {{column}}, .fns = as.character)) %>%
    replace_na(list({{columns}} = "missed"))
  
}


new_df <- airquality %>%
                myfun(Ozone)

I used {{}} before and I had no issues passing column names like airquality example above. Now at part of my actual function, I need to replace na s . the format above does not work with replace_na() .

any idea how to fix this?

dplyr tidyverse r function
1 Answers

I think you need to use replace_na() within mutate(). If you use the same strategy as for converting your columns to character, this seems to solve the problem:

myfun <- function(data, column){
  library(tidyverse)
  data <- as_tibble(data)
  data %>%
    mutate(across(.cols = {{column}}, .fns = ~ replace_na(as.character(.x), "missed")))
  
}


new_df <- airquality %>%
  myfun(Ozone)

The output:

> head(new_df)
# A tibble: 6 × 6
  Ozone  Solar.R  Wind  Temp Month   Day
  <chr>    <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <int>
1 41         190   7.4    67     5     1
2 36         118   8      72     5     2
3 12         149  12.6    74     5     3
4 18         313  11.5    62     5     4
5 missed      NA  14.3    56     5     5
6 28          NA  14.9    66     5     6
user_102642780
Related