Pass vector of symbols as function argument and convert to character vector

Question

I have a function that I want to pass as an argument a vector of symbols and then internally I want to convert that vector to a character vector.

Minimal example:

fun <- function(symbols = c(a, b, c)) {
 # code to convert to character vector 
}

fun()

Output:

[1] "a" "b" "c"

Answer 1

Here's an approach with rlang::quo_name:

library(rlang)
fun <- function(symbols = c(a, b, c)) {
  symbols <- enquo(symbols)
  string <- quo_name(symbols)
  unlist(strsplit(gsub("(c\\(|\\)|\\s)","",string),","))
}

fun(c(apple, orange, pear))
#[1] "apple"  "orange" "pear"

I suspect you're actually trying to solve another problem with this, so it probably makes sense to post that as another question.