Explicit Dot Pipe

This operator pipes an object forward into a function or call expression using an explicit placement of the dot (.) placeholder. Unlike magrittr's %>% operator, %.>% does not automatically place the left-hand side (lhs) as the first argument in the right-hand side (rhs) call. This operator provides a simpler alternative to the use of braces with magrittr, while achieving similar behavior.

Usage

lhs %.>% rhs

Arguments

lhs

A value to be piped forward.

rhs

A function call that utilizes the dot (.) placeholder to specify where lhs should be placed.

Value

No Return Value.

Details

The %.>% operator is used to pipe the lhs value into the rhs function call. Within the rhs expression, the placeholder . represents the position where lhs will be inserted. This provides more control over where the lhs value appears in the rhs function call, compared to the magrittr pipe operator which always places lhs as the first argument of rhs.

Unlike magrittr's pipe, which may require the use of braces to fully control the placement of lhs in nested function calls, %.>% simplifies this by directly allowing multiple usages of the dot placeholder without requiring braces. For example, the following expression using magrittr's pipe and braces:

library(magrittr)

1:10 %>% { c(min(.), max(.)) }

can be written as:

1:10 %.>% c(min(.), max(.))

without needing additional braces.

Downside

The disadvantage of %.>% is that you always need to use the dot placeholder, even when piping to the first argument of the right-hand side (rhs).

Examples

# Equivalent to `subset(head(iris), 1:nrow(head(iris)) %% 2 == 0)`
head(iris) %.>% subset(., 1:nrow(.) %% 2 == 0)
#>   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#> 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
#> 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
#> 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

# Equivalent to `c(min(1:10), max(1:10))`
1:10 %.>% c(min(.), max(.))
#> [1]  1 10