Can we not pass pipe chain output into linear model lm() dot placeholder?

Question

I wanted to know how to pass the output of pipe operation directly into lm().

For example, I can pass this following yay vector into lm() directly.

set.seed(40)
yay = c(rnorm(15), exp(rnorm(15)), runif(20, min = -3, max = 0))
lm(yay~1)

#> Call:
#> lm(formula = yay ~ 1)

#> Coefficients:
#> (Intercept)  
#>    -0.09522  

But when I tried something like this, it threw an error.

library(tidyverse)
library(palmerpenguins)

data("penguins")

filter_penguins <- penguins %>% filter(species == "Adelie") 

filter_penguins %>% 
  filter(island == "Torgersen") %>% 
  select(bill_length_mm) %>%
  pull() %>% 
  lm(. ~ 1)

#> Error in formula.default(object, env = baseenv()) : invalid formula

I have also tried to save the pull() output into object and later feed it into lm(), it works. But why the dot placeholder doesnot work this way?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

This issu is that lm() inside a pipeline consider the data given as formula argument. Therefore, the data is missplaced. Try:

filter_penguins %>% 
  filter(island == "Torgersen") %>% 
  select(bill_length_mm) %>%
  lm(data = ., pull(.) ~ 1)