R help - Nov 2009 - How to interpret the name of an object literally?

Hi, 

I can't seem to figure out how to tell R to stop expanding an object. I
would like to use the literal name rather than the expanded value. 

The issue occurs in a function I've been writing. The problematic part looks
like this: 

# "fund" is a matrix of open, high, low, close, and volume prices
returns <- function(fund)
{
     p_12ago = as.vector(fund[nrow(fund)-252,6])
     perc_diff_12mo = ((p_last - p_12ago) / p_last)*100

#This is the line that's giving me problems:
     funds=c(as.character(fund))

     mo12=c(perc_diff_12mo)
     final_results=data.frame(funds,mo12)
     return(final_results)
}

I can't figure out how to insert the original argument from the function (in
this case the name of the fund). 

Ultimately I want to be able to do returns("GOOG"), and have the
output in
this format:

funds     12mo
GOOG     14%

I've tried using as.character(), quote(), dQuote(), sQuote(), gsub(), cat(),
and a bunch of combinations of them. I'm brand new to R, so I apologize if
I'm going about this in the wrong way. 

Thanks in advance for any help!
Kevin

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On 11/24/2009 1:13 PM, novocaine wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I can't seem to figure out how to tell R to stop expanding an object. I
> would like to use the literal name rather than the expanded value. 
> 
> The issue occurs in a function I've been writing. The problematic part
looks
> like this: 
> 
> # "fund" is a matrix of open, high, low, close, and volume prices
> returns <- function(fund)
> {
>      p_12ago = as.vector(fund[nrow(fund)-252,6])
>      perc_diff_12mo = ((p_last - p_12ago) / p_last)*100
> 
> #This is the line that's giving me problems:
>      funds=c(as.character(fund))
> 
>      mo12=c(perc_diff_12mo)
>      final_results=data.frame(funds,mo12)
>      return(final_results)
> }
> 
> I can't figure out how to insert the original argument from the
function (in
> this case the name of the fund). 
> 
> Ultimately I want to be able to do returns("GOOG"), and have the
output in
> this format:
> 
> funds     12mo
> GOOG     14%
> 
> I've tried using as.character(), quote(), dQuote(), sQuote(), gsub(),
cat(),
> and a bunch of combinations of them. I'm brand new to R, so I apologize
if
> I'm going about this in the wrong way. 
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help!
Use deparse(substitute(fund)).  The inner function gives you the 
expression passed as fund, the deparse() turns it into a string.

You can in weird cases get more than one line of output from deparse; 
you could use the width.cutoff and/or nlines arguments to control this.

Duncan Murdoch