Using lapply with changing arguments

Question

R textbooks continue to promote the use of lapply instead of loops. This is easy even for functions with arguments like

lapply(somelist, f, a=1, b=2) 
         


        

Answer 1

You just need to work out what to lapply() over. Here the names() of the lists suffices, after we rewrite f() to take different arguments:

somelist <- list(USA = 1:10, Europe = 21:30,
                 Switzerland = seq(1, 5, length = 10))
anotherlist <- list(USA = list(a = 1, b = 2), Europe = list(a = 2, b = 4),
                    Switzerland = list(a = 0.5, b = 1))

f <- function(x, some, other) {
    (some[[x]] + other[[x]][["a"]]) * other[[x]][["b"]]
}

lapply(names(somelist), f, some = somelist, other = anotherlist)

Giving:

R> lapply(names(somelist), f, some = somelist, other = anotherlist)
[[1]]
 [1]  4  6  8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22

[[2]]
 [1]  92  96 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128

[[3]]
 [1] 1.500000 1.944444 2.388889 2.833333 3.277778 3.722222 4.166667 4.611111
 [9] 5.055556 5.500000