Beginner’s Guide to Piping Data in R
Combine a variety of in-built functions with pipe operator to do powerful data analysis
Published in
7 min readApr 13, 2020
The pipe operator %>% is used to pass the output of a function to another function, thereby enabling functions to be chained together. The end result is a block of very readable code with separate functions chained together.
Let’s see an example to understand. Consider the following 3 functions
- Square of a number — square
- Double of a number — double
- Inverse of a number — inverse
- Rounding off a number to 1 decimal place — round
Let’s say we want to apply these three functions to an array of numbers. One way to do that is to chain these functions together
#An array of numbers [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...., 1]
x = seq(0.1,1,by=0.1)#Chaining Them Together
round(square(double(inverse(x)), digits=1)
For longer chains it is harder to read and difficult to keep track of parenthesis. Consider the alternative using pipes
#An array of numbers [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...., 1]
x <- seq(0.1,1,by=0.1)#Pipeline of functions
x %>% square %>% double %>% inverse %>% round(digits=1)
