R Refer to (part of) data frame using string in R - r

Question

I have a large data set in which I have to search for specific codes depending on what i want. For example, chemotherapy is coded by ~40 codes, that can appear in any of 40 columns called (diag1, diag2, etc).
I am in the process of writing a function that produces plots depending on what I want to show. I thought it would be good to specify what I want to plot in a input data frame. Thus, for example, in case I only want to plot chemotherapy events for patients, I would have a data frame like this:
Dataframe name: Style
Name SearchIn codes PlotAs PlotColour
Chemo data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"] 1,2,3,4,5,6 | red
I already have a function that searches for codes in specific parts of the data frame and flags the events of interest. What i cannot do, and need your help with, is referring to a data frame (Style$SearchIn[1]) using codes in a data frame as above.
> Style$SearchIn[1]
[1] data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"]
Levels: data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"]
I thought perhaps get() would work, but I cant get it to work:
> get(Style$SearchIn[1])
Error in get(vars$SearchIn[1]) : invalid first argument
enter code here
or
> get(as.character(Style$SearchIn[1]))
Error in get(as.character(Style$SearchIn[1])) :
object 'data[substr(names(data),1,5)=="TDIAG"]' not found
Obviously, running data[substr(names(data),1,5)=="TDIAG"] works.
Example:
library(survival)
ex <- data.frame(SearchIn="lung[substr(names(lung),1,2) == 'ph']")
lung[substr(names(lung),1,2) == 'ph'] #works
get(ex$SearchIn[1]) # does not work

Answer 1

It is not a good idea to store R code in strings and then try to eval them when needed; there are nearly always better solutions for dynamic logic, such as lambdas.
I would recommend using a list to store the plot specification, rather than a data.frame. This would allow you to include a function as one of the list's components which could take the input data and return a subset of it for plotting.
For example:
library(survival);
plotFromSpec <- function(data,spec) {
filteredData <- spec$filter(data);
## ... draw a plot from filteredData and other stuff in spec ...
};
spec <- list(
Name='Chemo',
filter=function(data) data[,substr(names(data),1,2)=='ph'],
Codes=c(1,2,3,4,5,6),
PlotAs='|',
PlotColour='red'
);
plotFromSpec(lung,spec);
If you want to store multiple specifications, you could create a list of lists.

Answer 2

Have you tried using quote()
I'm not entirely sure what you want but maybe you could store the things you're trying to get() like
quote(data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"])
and then use eval()
eval(quote(data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"]), list(data=data))
For example,
dat <- data.frame("diag1"=1:10, "diag2"=1:10, "other"=1:10)
Style <- list(SearchIn=c(quote(data[substr(names(data),1,4)=="diag"]), quote("Other stuff")))
> head(eval(Style$SearchIn[[1]], list(data=dat)))
diag1 diag2
1 1 1
2 2 2
3 3 3
4 4 4
5 5 5
6 6 6