CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rfunctiondataframesave
Dmitry D. Onishchenko
Dmitry D. Onishchenko

Reputation: 155

Save a data frame to a file addressing by name

I have a data frame and a text variable containing the name of this data frame: 

adsl = data.frame(a=2, b=7, w=17)
ds_name = "adsl"

I want to save my data frame from the workspace to the file named "dest_file". The code should be wrapped into a function get_r() with the data frame name as an argument:

get_r(ds_name="adsl")

So I need to avoid using the explicit name "adsl" inside the code.

The following works almost correctly but the resulting data frame is called "temp_dataset", not "adsl":

get_r = function(ds_name){
    temp_dataset = eval(parse(text=ds_name))
    save(temp_dataset, file = "dest_file")
}

Here is another option which works wrong (the text string is being saved, not the data frame):

get_r = function(ds_name){
    save(ds_name, file = "dest_file")
}

What should I do to make R just execute

save(adsl, file="dest_file")

inside the function? Thank you for any help.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 78

Answers (1)

Rich Scriven
Rich Scriven

Reputation: 99331

Try

save(list = ds_name, file = "dest_file")

The list argument in save() allows you to pass the name of the data as a character string. See help(save) for more.

Upvotes: 1

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