Dynamic variable names in R regressions

Question

Being aware of the danger of using dynamic variable names, I am trying to loop over varios regression models where different variables specifications are choosen. Usually

Answer 1

The bang-bang operator !! only works with "tidy" functions. It's not a part of the core R language. A base R function like lm() has no idea how to expand such operators. Instead, you need to wrap those in functions that can do the expansion. rlang::expr is one such example

rlang::expr(summary(lm(y ~ !!rlang::sym(var) + x2, data=df2)))
# summary(lm(y ~ x1 + x2, data = df2))

Then you need to use rlang::eval_tidy to actually evaluate it

rlang::eval_tidy(rlang::expr(summary(lm(y ~ !!rlang::sym(var) + x2, data=df2))))

# Call:
# lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2, data = df2)
# 
# Residuals:
#     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
# -0.49178 -0.25482  0.00027  0.24566  0.50730 
# 
# Coefficients:
#               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
# (Intercept)  0.4953683  0.0242949  20.390   <2e-16 ***
# x1          -0.0006298  0.0314389  -0.020    0.984    
# x2          -0.0052848  0.0318073  -0.166    0.868    
# ---
# Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
#
# Residual standard error: 0.2882 on 997 degrees of freedom
# Multiple R-squared:  2.796e-05,   Adjusted R-squared:  -0.001978 
# F-statistic: 0.01394 on 2 and 997 DF,  p-value: 0.9862

You can see this version preserves the expanded formula in the model object.