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ggplot2 (version 3.4.0)

tidyeval: Tidy eval helpers

Description

This page lists the tidy eval tools reexported in this package from rlang. To learn about using tidy eval in scripts and packages at a high level, see the dplyr programming vignette and the ggplot2 in packages vignette. The Metaprogramming section of Advanced R may also be useful for a deeper dive.

  • The tidy eval operators {{, !!, and !!! are syntactic constructs which are specially interpreted by tidy eval functions. You will mostly need {{, as !! and !!! are more advanced operators which you should not have to use in simple cases.

    The curly-curly operator {{ allows you to tunnel data-variables passed from function arguments inside other tidy eval functions. {{ is designed for individual arguments. To pass multiple arguments contained in dots, use ... in the normal way.

    my_function <- function(data, var, ...) {
      data %>%
        group_by(...) %>%
        summarise(mean = mean({{ var }}))
    }
    

  • enquo() and enquos() delay the execution of one or several function arguments. The former returns a single expression, the latter returns a list of expressions. Once defused, expressions will no longer evaluate on their own. They must be injected back into an evaluation context with !! (for a single expression) and !!! (for a list of expressions).

    my_function <- function(data, var, ...) {
      # Defuse
      var <- enquo(var)
      dots <- enquos(...)

    # Inject data %>% group_by(!!!dots) %>% summarise(mean = mean(!!var)) }

    In this simple case, the code is equivalent to the usage of {{ and ... above. Defusing with enquo() or enquos() is only needed in more complex cases, for instance if you need to inspect or modify the expressions in some way.

  • The .data pronoun is an object that represents the current slice of data. If you have a variable name in a string, use the .data pronoun to subset that variable with [[.

    my_var <- "disp"
    mtcars %>% summarise(mean = mean(.data[[my_var]]))
    

  • Another tidy eval operator is :=. It makes it possible to use glue and curly-curly syntax on the LHS of =. For technical reasons, the R language doesn't support complex expressions on the left of =, so we use := as a workaround.

    my_function <- function(data, var, suffix = "foo") {
      # Use `{{` to tunnel function arguments and the usual glue
      # operator `{` to interpolate plain strings.
      data %>%
        summarise("{{ var }}_mean_{suffix}" := mean({{ var }}))
    }
    

  • Many tidy eval functions like dplyr::mutate() or dplyr::summarise() give an automatic name to unnamed inputs. If you need to create the same sort of automatic names by yourself, use as_label(). For instance, the glue-tunnelling syntax above can be reproduced manually with:

    my_function <- function(data, var, suffix = "foo") {
      var <- enquo(var)
      prefix <- as_label(var)
      data %>%
        summarise("{prefix}_mean_{suffix}" := mean(!!var))
    }
    

    Expressions defused with enquo() (or tunnelled with {{) need not be simple column names, they can be arbitrarily complex. as_label() handles those cases gracefully. If your code assumes a simple column name, use as_name() instead. This is safer because it throws an error if the input is not a name as expected.

Arguments