[R] data =

Duncan Murdoch
Sat, 04 Oct 2025 13:31:26 -0000

On 2025-10-03 7:54 p.m., R Jerome Anderson wrote:
> I can code summary(midterm_df$hv109) and I get the summary of variable
> hv109. No problem.
>
> Yet when I write the code:
>
> summary(hv109, data = midterm_df)
>
> I get this error:
>
> Error in h(simpleError(msg, call)) : error in evaluating the argument
> 'object' in selecting a method for function 'summary':
object 'hv109' not
> found
>
> If I write the code summary('hv109', data = midterm_df), R treats
hv109 as
> if it were a character variable. It is not.
>
> Page 521 in Andrews *Doing Data Science in R* shows the data = [df]
> command. I thought it was straightforward. Why doesn't my code work?
>
> Any help w/ this would be appreciated.

Not all functions support a `data` argument.  You can read about the
`summary()` function using `?summary`, and none of the variations shown
there have `data` as an argument.

For cases like this, you can use the `with()` function, e.g.

   with(midterm_df, summary(hv109))

`with()` temporarily attaches the columns of the dataframe as separate
variables.

Duncan Murdoch