0

After I install the config package, I can no longer use merge function on my dataframes. I am getting error message "merge in error, ..., unused arguments."

neilfws
  • 32,751
  • 5
  • 50
  • 63
John Smith
  • 199
  • 9

2 Answers2

1

Looks like config has a merge() function which overrides the base function.

Type base::merge() to get the base R function.

EDIT: or as pointed out by @PoGibas, don't load config and use config::merge.

neilfws
  • 32,751
  • 5
  • 50
  • 63
  • I have a lot of codes using the merge function, is there a way to fix this without adding base:: to every call? Thanks. – John Smith Mar 08 '18 at 02:20
  • 1
    @JohnSmith you can use `config` package functions with `config::function` instead of loading it. Might be more logical than overwriting `base` `R` functions. – pogibas Mar 08 '18 at 02:44
  • 2
    @JohnSmith btw even in their [vignette](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/config/vignettes/introduction.html) code they don't load the package and use it with `config::package` – pogibas Mar 08 '18 at 02:47
0

Another way to address the problem of config masking base::merge() is to load the config package, use it to configure the environment, and then use detach() to remove the package. This will unmask base::merge().

library(config)
# use config functions to set up environment
#

At this point we can show that config::merge is the default by printing the merge() function.

> merge
function (base_config, merge_config) 
{
    merge_lists(base_config, merge_config, recursive = TRUE)
}
<bytecode: 0x7fcddf5de488>
<environment: namespace:config>
>

To restore base::merge() as the default, we use the detach() function. 

detach(package:config)
# at this point base::merge() and base::get() are unmasked

To demonstrate this, we'll print the merge() function again. 

> detach(package:config)
> # print merge function to show it is from base package 
> merge
function (x, y, ...) 
UseMethod("merge")
<bytecode: 0x7fcde7c08e70>
<environment: namespace:base>
>
Len Greski
  • 10,505
  • 2
  • 22
  • 33