R: fast (conditional) subsetting where feasible

Question

I would like to subset rows of my data

library(data.table); set.seed(333); n <- 100
dat <- data.table(id=1:n, x=runif(n,100,120), y=runif(n,200,220),          


        

Answer 1

I agree with Konrad's answer that this should throw a warning or at least report what happens somehow. Here's a data.table way that will take advantage of indices (see package vignettes for details):

f = function(x, ..., verbose=FALSE){
  L   = substitute(list(...))[-1]
  mon = data.table(cond = as.character(L))[, skip := FALSE]

  for (i in seq_along(L)){
    d = eval( substitute(x[cond, verbose=v], list(cond = L[[i]], v = verbose)) )
    if (nrow(d)){
      x = d
    } else {
      mon[i, skip := TRUE]
    }    
  }
  print(mon)
  return(x)
}

Usage

> f(dat, x > 119, y > 219, y > 1e6)
        cond  skip
1:   x > 119 FALSE
2:   y > 219 FALSE
3: y > 1e+06  TRUE
   id        x        y        z
1: 55 119.2634 219.0044 315.6556

The verbose option will print extra info provided by data.table package, so you can see when indices are being used. For example, with f(dat, x == 119, verbose=TRUE), I see it.

because I fear the if-then jungle would be rather slow, especially since I need to apply all of this to different data.tables within a list using lapply(.).

If it's for non-interactive use, maybe better to have the function return list(mon = mon, x = x) to more easily keep track of what the query was and what happened. Also, the verbose console output could be captured and returned.