use assign() inside purrr:walk()

Question

I have a number of dataframes and a series of changes I want to make to each of them. For this example, let to the desired change be simply making each data frame a tibble using as_tibble. I know there are various ways of doing this, but I'd like to do this using purrr:walk.

For data frames df1 and df2,

df1 <- mtcars
df2 <- mtcars

I'd like to do the equivalent of

df1 %<>% as_tibble
df2 %<>% as_tibble

using walk. My attempt:

library(tidyverse)
walk(c(df1, df2), ~ assign(deparse(substitute(.)), as_tibble(.)))

This runs but does not make the desired change:

is_tibble(df1)
#> [1] FALSE

Answer 1

Here is how you can combine assign with walk (see the comments the code for more explanation)-

library(tidyverse)

# data
df1 <- mtcars
df2 <- mtcars

# creating tibbles

# this creates a list of objects with names ("df1", "df2") 
tibble::lst(df1, df2) %>%
purrr::walk2(
  .x = names(.),         # names to assign
  .y = .,                # object to be assigned
  .f = ~ assign(x = .x, 
                value = tibble::as.tibble(.y), 
                envir = .GlobalEnv)
)

# checking the newly created tibbles
df1
#> # A tibble: 32 x 11
#>      mpg   cyl  disp    hp  drat    wt  qsec    vs    am  gear  carb
#>  * <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#>  1  21       6  160    110  3.9   2.62  16.5     0     1     4     4
#>  2  21       6  160    110  3.9   2.88  17.0     0     1     4     4
#>  3  22.8     4  108     93  3.85  2.32  18.6     1     1     4     1
#>  4  21.4     6  258    110  3.08  3.22  19.4     1     0     3     1
#>  5  18.7     8  360    175  3.15  3.44  17.0     0     0     3     2
#>  6  18.1     6  225    105  2.76  3.46  20.2     1     0     3     1
#>  7  14.3     8  360    245  3.21  3.57  15.8     0     0     3     4
#>  8  24.4     4  147.    62  3.69  3.19  20       1     0     4     2
#>  9  22.8     4  141.    95  3.92  3.15  22.9     1     0     4     2
#> 10  19.2     6  168.   123  3.92  3.44  18.3     1     0     4     4
#> # ... with 22 more rows

df2
#> # A tibble: 32 x 11
#>      mpg   cyl  disp    hp  drat    wt  qsec    vs    am  gear  carb
#>  * <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#>  1  21       6  160    110  3.9   2.62  16.5     0     1     4     4
#>  2  21       6  160    110  3.9   2.88  17.0     0     1     4     4
#>  3  22.8     4  108     93  3.85  2.32  18.6     1     1     4     1
#>  4  21.4     6  258    110  3.08  3.22  19.4     1     0     3     1
#>  5  18.7     8  360    175  3.15  3.44  17.0     0     0     3     2
#>  6  18.1     6  225    105  2.76  3.46  20.2     1     0     3     1
#>  7  14.3     8  360    245  3.21  3.57  15.8     0     0     3     4
#>  8  24.4     4  147.    62  3.69  3.19  20       1     0     4     2
#>  9  22.8     4  141.    95  3.92  3.15  22.9     1     0     4     2
#> 10  19.2     6  168.   123  3.92  3.44  18.3     1     0     4     4
#> # ... with 22 more rows

^{Created on 2018-11-13 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}