If statement with multiple actions in R

Question

I would like to write an if statement of the following form:

a=5
b=2

la<-function(a,b){
if(a>3){a}
else{b}
}

Now what I would like to do is not only have one action in the if statement but two, for example:

if(a>3){a and c<<-1000}

In this case to return 'a' and also write 1000 in variable 'c'

My question is how to put in multiple actions after the if statement.

Answer 1

You should use the semicolon

if(a>3){c<-1000;a}

The last statement is the return value.

EDIT This works for multiple statements, too. You can omit the semicolon if you use line breaks, as in

if(a>3) {
  c<-1000
  d<-1500
  a
} else {
  e <- 2000
  b
}

EDIT: this should work with ifelse too. You would have to keep in mind that you are operating on a vector, though. Here is an example:

x <- sample(10, 100, replace=TRUE)
ifelse(x>3, {y <- 100; y+x}, x)

This adds 100 only to those elements of x that are larger than 3.