How to use R’s ellipsis feature when writing your own function?

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The R language has a nifty feature for defining functions that can take a variable number of arguments. For example, the function data.frame takes any number of arguments, and each argument becomes the data for a column in the resulting data table. Example usage:

> data.frame(letters=c("a", "b", "c"), numbers=c(1,2,3), notes=c("do", "re", "mi"))
  letters numbers notes
1       a       1    do
2       b       2    re
3       c       3    mi

The function’s signature includes an ellipsis, like this:

function (..., row.names = NULL, check.rows = FALSE, check.names = TRUE, 
    stringsAsFactors = default.stringsAsFactors()) 
{
    [FUNCTION DEFINITION HERE]
}

I would like to write a function that does something similar, taking multiple values and consolidating them into a single return value (as well as doing some other processing). In order to do this, I need to figure out how to “unpack” the ... from the function’s arguments within the function. I don’t know how to do this. The relevant line in the function definition of data.frame is object <- as.list(substitute(list(...)))[-1L], which I can’t make any sense of.

So how can I convert the ellipsis from the function’s signature into, for example, a list?

To be more specific, how can I write get_list_from_ellipsis in the code below?

my_ellipsis_function(...) {
    input_list <- get_list_from_ellipsis(...)
    output_list <- lapply(X=input_list, FUN=do_something_interesting)
    return(output_list)
}

my_ellipsis_function(a=1:10,b=11:20,c=21:30)

Edit

It seems there are two possible ways to do this. They are as.list(substitute(list(...)))[-1L] and list(...). However, these two do not do exactly the same thing. (For differences, see examples in the answers.) Can anyone tell me what the practical difference between them is, and which one I should use?

5 Answers
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