Creating formula using very long strings in R

Question

I\'m in a situation where I have a vector full of column names for a really large data frame.

Let\'s assume: x = c(\"Name\", \"address\", \"Gender\", ......, \

Answer 1

The problem is that you have R keywords as column names. else is a keyword so you can't use it as a regular name.

A simplified example:

s <- c("x", "else", "z")
f <- paste("y~", paste(s, collapse="+"))
formula(f)
# Error in parse(text = x) : :1:10: unexpected '+'
# 1: y~ x+else+
#              ^

The solution is to wrap your words in backticks "`" so that R will treat them as non-syntactic variable names.

f <- paste("y~", paste(sprintf("`%s`", s), collapse="+"))
formula(f)
# y ~ x + `else` + z