R code that applies a function to subsection of variables of a dataframe and saves it to original dataframe

Question

I have a dataframe like mtcars

I want to program a function that searches for all variables of mtcars that start with "c", converts them to character and saves them back to mtcars.

Answer 1

Here is one way:

f <- function(x, str = "^var") {
    want <- grep(str, names(x))
    x[, want] <- sapply(x[, want], as.character)
    x
}

[Edit: alternative version that implements the points raised by @hadley in comments.]

f <- function(x, str = "^var") {
    want <- grepl(str, names(x))
    x[, want] <- lapply(x[, want], as.character)
    x
}

The function allows you to pass through the string you want to match on, but defaults to "^var" as you requested. The "^" indicates we want to find names that start with "var", not any name that contains "var".

Example:

> bigdf <- data.frame(var1 = LETTERS[1:3], var2 = letters[1:3], var3 = 1:3, 
+                     stuff = 4:6)
> bigdf
  var1 var2 var3 stuff
1    A    a    1     4
2    B    b    2     5
3    C    c    3     6
> 
> bigdf2 <- f(bigdf)
> bigdf2
  var1 var2 var3 stuff
1    A    a    1     4
2    B    b    2     5
3    C    c    3     6
> str(bigdf2)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  4 variables:
 $ var1 : chr  "A" "B" "C"
 $ var2 : chr  "a" "b" "c"
 $ var3 : chr  "1" "2" "3"
 $ stuff: int  4 5 6