use sprintf with a vector rather than a variable number of arguments in R

Question

I would like to use the sprintf function in R with a variable number of arguments. Can I bundle these arguments together in a character vector or list in order to avoid supplying these arguments to sprintf individually?

An example will clarify:

base_string = "(1) %s, (2) %s, (3) %s"
sprintf(base_string, "foo", "bar", "baz") # this works
sprintf(base_string, c("foo", "bar", "baz")) # this doesn't work

In Python I can accomplish this with

base_string = "(1) %s, (2) %s, (3) %s"
base_string % ("foo", "bar", "baz")

Answer 1

We can use do.call

do.call(sprintf, c(fmt = base_string, as.list(v1)))

data

v1 <- c("foo", "bar", "baz")