splice {rlang} | R Documentation |
splice
marks an object to be spliced. It is equivalent to using
!!!
in a function with tidy dots semantics.
splice(x) is_spliced(x) is_spliced_bare(x) dots_splice(..., .ignore_empty = c("trailing", "none", "all"))
x |
A list to splice. |
... |
Arguments with explicit ( |
.ignore_empty |
Whether to ignore empty arguments. Can be one
of |
dots_splice()
is like dots_list()
but automatically splices
list inputs.
The !!!
operator works differently in standard functions taking
dots with dots_list()
than in quoting functions taking dots
with enexprs()
or enquos()
.
In quoting functions !!!
disaggregates its argument (let's call
it x
) into as many objects as there are elements in
x
. E.g. quo(foo(!!! c(1, 2)))
is completely equivalent to
quo(foo(1, 2))
. The creation of those separate objects has an
overhead but is typically not important when manipulating calls
because function calls typically take a small number of
arguments.
In standard functions, disaggregating the spliced collection
would have a negative performance impact in cases where
dots_list()
is used to build up data structures from user
inputs. To avoid this spliced inputs are marked with splice()
and the final list is built with (the equivalent of)
flatten_if(dots, is_spliced)
.
Most of the time you should not care about the difference. However
if you use a standard function taking tidy dots within a quoting
function, the !!!
operator will disaggregate its argument because
the behaviour of the quasiquoting function has priority. You might
then observe some performance cost in edge cases. Here is one
example where this would happen:
purrr::rerun(10, dplyr::bind_rows(!!! x))
purrr::rerun()
is a quoting function and dplyr::bind_rows()
is
a standard function. Because bind_rows()
is called inside
rerun()
, the list x
will be disaggregated into a pairlist of
arguments. To avoid this you can use splice()
instead:
purrr::rerun(10, dplyr::bind_rows(splice(x)))
dots_splice()
is in questioning stage. It is part of our
experiments with dots semantics. Compared to dots_list()
,
dots_splice()
automatically splices lists. We now lean towards
adopting a single type of dots semantics (those of dots_list()
)
where splicing is explicit.
splice()
is in questioning stage. It is not clear whether it is
really needed as there are other ways to avoid the performance
issue discussed in the section above.