CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rlubridate
Jirka Čep
Jirka Čep

Reputation: 191

R use %within% operator without calling library(lubridate)

I'm writing a function that uses some lubridate functions.

However, I'm not sure how to import the function %within% from lubridate. Usually this is easy, as I just use lubridate::function. When I tried this with the %within% operator, this did not work. Is there any way to use operators from packages without loading the entire package itself?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 909

Answers (1)

eduardokapp
eduardokapp

Reputation: 1751

Yes. The issue here is that %within% is a special symbol that is also a function. In R, pretty much everything is a function. For example, when you do 2 + 2, R actually interprets that as

`+`(2, 2)

Check this section from "Advanced R" by Hadley Wickham to understand this details.

So the most direct answer to your question would be: use the same logic for the %within% function, but escaping the % symbol and directly specifying arguments a and b for the function.

lubridate::`%within%`(a, b)

If you're developing a package yourself, you can document your function that uses %within% using roxygen2. All you need to do is:

#' @title Your Nice Function
#' @description This is a description...
#' @param a Your first param
#' @param b Your second param
#' @importFrom lubridate \%within\%
your_nice_function <- function(a, b) {
...
}

That does it, because you're saying that this function imports the specific function %within% from lubridate, without loading the entire lubridate package.

However, if you just want to use the function inside a script the most "familiar" way possible, maybe the best way is to:

`%within%` <- lubridate::`%within%`

By doing so, you're essentially copying the function to a local variable of the same name.

Upvotes: 8

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