get lhs object name when piping with dplyr

Question

I\'d like to have a function that can use pipe operator as exported from dplyr. I am not using magrittr.

df %>% my_function

How can I get df

Answer 1

I don't believe this is possible without adding an extra argument to your my_function. When chaining functions with dplyr it automatically converts the df to a tbl_df object, hence the new name "." within the dplyr scope to make the piping simpler.

The following is a very hacky way with dplyr which just adds an addition argument to return the name of the original data.frame

my_function <- function(tbl, orig.df){print(deparse(substitute(orig.df)))}
df %>% my_function(df)
[1] "df"

Note you couldn't just pass the df with your original function because the tbl_df object is automatically passed to all subsequent functions.