Re: [R] lapply not reading arguments from the correct environment You need to study carefully what the semantics of 'subset' are.  The  function body of myfun is not in the evaluation environment.  (The issue  is 'subset', not 'lapply': select is an *expression* and not a value.) Hint: using subset() programmatically is almost always a mistake.  R's  subsetting function is '[': subset is a convenience wrapper. On Fri, 18 May 2007, jiho wrote: > Hello, > > I am facing a problem with lapply which I ''''think''' may be a bug. > This is the most basic function in which I can reproduce it: > > myfun <- function() > { > 	foo = data.frame(1:10,10:1) > 	foos = list(foo) > 	fooCollumn=2 > 	cFoo = lapply(foos,subset,select=fooCollumn) > 	return(cFoo) > } > > I am building a list of dataframes, in each of which I want to keep > only column 2 (obviously I would not do it this way in real life but > that's just to demonstrate the bug). > If I execute the commands inline it works but if I clean my > environment, then define the function and then execute: > 	> myfun() > I get this error: > 	Error in eval(expr, envir, enclos) : object "fooCollumn" not found > while fooCollumn is defined, in the function, right before lapply. In > addition, if I define it outside the function and then execute the > function: > 	> fooCollumn=1 > 	> myfun() > it works but uses the value defined in the general environment and > not the one defined in the function. > This is with R 2.5.0 on both OS X and Linux (Fedora Core 6) > What did I do wrong? Is this indeed a bug? An intended behavior? It is a bug, in your function. --  Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.