Learning to `walk2`

tidyverse
1

I've tried out the walk/walk2 function a few times today and I think I'm missing something.
My intention was to print a few plots and have the main title be different across each of them.

library(purrr)
library(dplyr)

Orange %>% 
   walk2(.x = .,
         .y = .$Tree, 
         .f = ~plot(x = .x$age, y = .x$circumference, type = "l", main = .y))

I've tried throwing a group_by in there and not using the simplified formula structure:

Orange %>% 
   group_by(Tree) %>% 
   walk(.x = ., 
        .f = function(.x, .y){plot(x = .x$age, y = .x$circumference, type = "l")})

Does anyone have some suggestions? ( reprex is unnecessary this is base r data)

2

A reprex would really be appreciated, it just makes it easier for everyone else to see what is going on with your code.

As a copy/paste of the first piece of code you show will not run due to a syntax error. Is that the issue you are having?

There is lot of high-powered help here who would like to help but without some idea of what the problem is you are running into it's going to be hard for them to give a hand. So an explanation of specifically what is not working as you expect it to would help too. A comment in the reprex where the unexpected output is would one way to do that, for example:

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(purrr))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))

# A syntax error occurs in this statement
Orange %>% 
    walk2(.x = ., .
                .y = .$Tree, 
                .f = ~plot(x = .x$age, y = .x$circumference, type = "l", main = .y))
#> Error: <text>:7:33: unexpected symbol
#> 6:         walk2(.x = ., .
#> 7:                                 .y
#>                                    ^
3

You can do multiple plots without walk... this has some issues that someone with a better idea of how plots works may be able to explain.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(purrr))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))

Orange %>% 
    group_by(Tree) %>%
    do(plot(.$age, .$circumference, type= "l", main = .$Tree[[1]]))


#> Error: Results 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 must be data frames, not NULL

4

@danr, I fixed the "., ." typo. I mentioned in my post that my objective was:

"to print a few plots and have the main title be different across each of them"

I thought walk would let the plot function print a separate plot for each factor level of Orange.

reprex

Orange %>%  
   walk2(.x = ., .y = .$Tree, .f = ~plot(x = .x$age, y = .x$circumference, type = "l", main = .y))
#> Error in Orange %>% walk2(.x = ., .y = .$Tree, .f = ~plot(x = .x$age, : could not find function "%>%"
5

If you pass Orange directly into .x. or .y, walk2 will iterate over the variables, not the groups. To do that, split the data into a list. The names of the list elements will be the levels of whatever you split on, so they'll make nice titles:

library(purrr)

par(mfrow = c(2, 3))

Orange %>% 
    split(.$Tree) %>% 
    .[order(names(.))] %>% 
    walk2(paste('Tree', names(.)), 
          ~plot(circumference ~ age, data = .x, type = "l", main = .y))

This particular usage effectively rebuilds iwalk, with which you could write

Orange %>% 
    split(.$Tree) %>% 
    .[order(names(.))] %>% 
    iwalk(~plot(circumference ~ age, data = .x, type = "l", main = paste('Tree', .y)))

which returns the same thing.

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