Tutorial by Examples

The pipe operator, %>%, is used to insert an argument into a function. It is not a base feature of the language and can only be used after attaching a package that provides it, such as magrittr. The pipe operator takes the left-hand side (LHS) of the pipe and uses it as the first argument of the ...

Given a sequence of steps we use repeatedly, it's often handy to store it in a function. Pipes allow for saving such functions in a readable format by starting a sequence with a dot as in: . %>% RHS As an example, suppose we have factor dates and want to extract the year: library(magrittr) ...

The magrittr package contains a compound assignment infix-operator, %<>%, that updates a value by first piping it into one or more rhs expressions and then assigning the result. This eliminates the need to type an object name twice (once on each side of the assignment operator <-). %<&gt...

The exposition pipe operator, %$%, exposes the column names as R symbols within the left-hand side object to the right-hand side expression. This operator is handy when piping into functions that do not have a data argument (unlike, say, lm) and that don't take a data.frame and column names as arg...

The %>% operator can also be used to pipe the dplyr output into ggplot. This creates a unified exploratory data analysis (EDA) pipeline that is easily customizable. This method is faster than doing the aggregations internally in ggplot and has the added benefit of avoiding unnecessary intermediat...

Some functions in R produce a side effect (i.e. saving, printing, plotting, etc) and do not always return a meaningful or desired value. %T>% (tee operator) allows you to forward a value into a side-effect-producing function while keeping the original lhs value intact. In other words: the tee op...