Function to apply arbitrary functions in R

Question

How would one implement in R the function apply.func(func, arg.list), which takes an arbitrary function func and a suitable list arg.list as arguments, and returns the result of calling func with the arguments contained in arg.list. E.g.

apply.func(foo, list(x="A", y=1, z=TRUE))

is equivalent to

foo(x="A", y=1, z=TRUE)

Thanks!

P.S. FWIW, the Python equivalent of apply.func would be something like

def apply_func(func, arg_list):
    return func(*arg_list)

or

def apply_func(func, kwarg_dict):
    return func(**kwarg_dict)

or some variant thereof.

Answer 1

I think do.call is what you're looking for. You can read about it via ?do.call.

The classic example of how folks use do.call is to rbind data frames or matrices together:

d1 <- data.frame(x = 1:5,y = letters[1:5])
d2 <- data.frame(x = 6:10,y = letters[6:10])

do.call(rbind,list(d1,d2))

Here's another fairly trivial example using sum:

do.call(sum,list(1:5,runif(10)))