Error: Quosures can only be unquoted within a quasiquotation context

Question

I am setting up a function to make it easier to run weights:wtd.chi.sq on a number of columns simultaneously.

Here is my sample data:

library(weights) 

 data_in <- read_table2("Q50_1   Q50_2   Q38 Q90 pov gender  wgt1 wgt2
never   always   Yes 2   High    M   1.3 0.4
sometimes   always   No  2   Med F   0.4 0.2
always   sometimes   Yes 4   Low F   1.2 0.7
never   never   No  2   High    M   0.5 0.7
always   always   No  4   High    M   0.7 0.8
sometimes   never   Yes 3   Low F   0.56 0.3
sometimes   never   Yes 2   Med F   0.9 0.1
")

I would use this line to find the chi sq value for Q50_1 by pov:

wtd.chi.sq(data_in$Q50_1,data_in$pov, weight = data_in$wgt1)
    Chisq        df   p.value 
7.3395092 4.0000000 0.1189981

Since I need to repeat this for a df with thousands of variables, I have set up a function to run it. wtd.chi.sq takes vectors, not column names, so it's a little tricky to feed the relevant column in. The function I wrote looks like this:

xtab_func <- function(dat, col, target, wgt){
  col <- sym(col)
  target <- enquo(target)
  wgt <- enquo(wgt)
  weights::wtd.chi.sq(noquote(paste0(dat,"$",!!target)), noquote(paste0(dat,"$",!!col)), weight = noquote(paste0(dat,"$",!!wgt)))
}

But when I run it:
xtab_func('dat', 'Q50_1','pov','wgt1')

 Error: Quosures can only be unquoted within a quasiquotation context.

  # Bad:
  list(!!myquosure)

  # Good:
  dplyr::mutate(data, !!myquosure)
Run `rlang::last_error()` to see where the error occurred. 

Could anyone tell me what is going on here?!

Answer 1

It may be better to use ensym as we can pass either quoted or unquoted as input. The symbol is then converted to string with as_string, then we use the base R Extract method ([[) to extract the column as a vector to be used in wtd.chi.sq

xtab_func <- function(dat, col, target, wgt){
  col <- rlang::as_string(ensym(col))
  target <- rlang::as_string(ensym(target))
  wgt <- rlang::as_string(ensym(wgt))
   wtd.chi.sq(dat[[target]],dat[[col]], weight = dat[[wgt]])

}

-testing

xtab_func(data_in, 'Q50_1','pov','wgt1')
 Chisq        df   p.value 
7.3395092 4.0000000 0.1189981 
xtab_func(data_in, Q50_1, pov, wgt1)
    Chisq        df   p.value 
7.3395092 4.0000000 0.1189981 

NOTE: The dataset passed into the function is not quoted