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base (version 3.6.2)

dots: …, ..1, etc used in Functions

Description

and ..1, ..2 etc are used to refer to arguments passed down from a calling function. These (and the following) can only be used inside a function which has ... among it formal arguments.

...elt(n) is a functional way to get ..<n> and basically the same as eval(paste0("..", n)), just more elegant and efficient. Note that switch(n, ...) is very close, differing by returning NULL invisibly instead of an error when n is zero or too large.

...length() returns the number of expressions in . This is the same as length(list(...)) but without evaluating the expressions in ... (which happens with list(...)).

Usage

...length()
...elt(n)

Arguments

n

a positive integer, not larger than the number of expressions in …, which is the same as ...length() which is the same as length(list(...)), but the latter evaluates all expressions in .

See Also

and ..1, ..2 are reserved words in R, see Reserved.

For more, see the Introduction to R manual for usage of these syntactic elements, and dotsMethods for their use in formal (S4) methods.

Examples

Run this code
# NOT RUN {
tst <- function(n, ...) ...elt(n)
tst(1, pi=pi*0:1, 2:4) ## [1] 0.000000 3.141593
tst(2, pi=pi*0:1, 2:4) ## [1] 2 3 4
try(tst(1)) # -> Error about '...' not containing an element.

tst.dl <- function(x, ...) ...length()
tst.dl(1:10)    # 0  (because the first argument is 'x')
tst.dl(4, 5)    # 1
tst.dl(4, 5, 6) # 2  namely '5, 6'
tst.dl(4, 5, 6, 7, sin(1:10), "foo"/"bar") # 5.  Note: no evaluation!
# }

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