concatenating column names with column data in R (using data.table)

Question

I have a data.table as follows,

library(data.table)

dt<-structure(list(varx = c(0L, 1L, 0L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 0L, 0L
), vary = c(0L, 0L, 0L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 0L, 0L)), class = c("data.table", 
"data.frame"), row.names = c(NA, -10L))
dt
    varx vary
 1:    0    0
 2:    1    0
 3:    0    0
 4:    0    0
 5:    1    1
 6:    0    0
 7:    1    1
 8:    0    0
 9:    0    0
10:    0    0

and I am trying to get the following output:

dt 
    varx    vary
1:  varx_n  vary_n
2:  varx_y  vary_n
3:  varx_n  vary_n
4:  varx_n  vary_n
5:  varx_y  vary_y
6:  varx_n  vary_n
7:  varx_y  vary_y
8:  varx_n  vary_n
9:  varx_n  vary_n
10: varx_n  vary_n

using the following code:

dt[,lapply(.SD, function(x){
  ifelse(x==1,paste0(.SD,"_y"),paste0(.SD,"_n"))
})]

However, I am not getting the desired output. Please help.

Answer 1

Use Map and a bit of factor labelling to pair each variable name with the n/y label required.

dt[, Map(paste, names(dt), lapply(.SD,factor,labels=c("n","y")), sep="_")]

#      varx   vary
# 1: varx_n vary_n
# 2: varx_y vary_n
# 3: varx_n vary_n
# 4: varx_n vary_n
# 5: varx_y vary_y
# 6: varx_n vary_n
# 7: varx_y vary_y
# 8: varx_n vary_n
# 9: varx_n vary_n
#10: varx_n vary_n