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Let's say I have a function that takes variable arguments, such as sprintf(). I want something like:

sprintf("%s %s", "a", "b")

but I have "a" and "b" in a vector c("a", "b"). A call such as 

sprintf("%s %s", c("a", "b"))

will produce an error for not enough arguments. Many languages provide a way to "flatten" a vector into a variable-length argument. But I cannot seem to find the syntax for doing so in R. Is there a way?

Tyler Rinker
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Ara Vartanian
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1 Answers1

27

You can use do.call:

vec <- c("a","b")
do.call(sprintf, c(list("%s %s"), vec))
# [1] "a b"
Joshua Ulrich
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