Editing R (programming language) (section)

=== Native pipe operator ===
In R version 4.1.0, a native [[Pipeline (computing)|pipe operator]], <code>|></code>, was introduced.<ref>{{Cite web |title=R: R News |url=https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/NEWS.html |access-date=2024-03-14 |website=cran.r-project.org}}</ref> This operator allows users to chain functions together one after another, instead of a nested function call.

<syntaxhighlight lang="rout">
> nrow(subset(mtcars, cyl == 4)) # Nested without the pipe character
[1] 11

> mtcars |> subset(cyl == 4) |> nrow() # Using the pipe character
[1] 11
</syntaxhighlight>

Another alternative to nested functions, in contrast to using the pipe character, is using intermediate objects:

<syntaxhighlight lang="rout">
> mtcars_subset_rows <- subset(mtcars, cyl == 4)
> num_mtcars_subset <- nrow(mtcars_subset_rows)
> print(num_mtcars_subset)
[1] 11
</syntaxhighlight>While the pipe operator can produce code that is easier to read, it has been advised to pipe together at most 10 to 15 lines and chunk code into [[Task (project management)|sub-tasks]] which are saved into objects with meaningful names.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wickham |first=Hadley |url=https://r4ds.hadley.nz/ |title=R for data science: import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data |last2=Çetinkaya-Rundel |first2=Mine |last3=Grolemund |first3=Garrett |date=2023 |publisher=O'Reilly |isbn=978-1-4920-9740-2 |edition=2nd |location=Beijing; Sebastopol, CA |chapter=4 Workflow: code style |oclc=on1390607935 |chapter-url=https://r4ds.hadley.nz/workflow-style.html}}</ref> 

Here is an example with fewer than 10 lines that some readers may still struggle to grasp without intermediate named steps:<syntaxhighlight lang="r" line="1">(\(x, n = 42, key = c(letters, LETTERS, " ", ":", ")"))
    strsplit(x, "")[[1]] |>
    (Vectorize(\(chr) which(chr == key) - 1))() |>
    (`+`)(n) |>
    (`%%`)(length(key)) |>
    (\(i) key[i + 1])() |>
    paste(collapse = "")
)("duvFkvFksnvEyLkHAErnqnoyr")</syntaxhighlight>