Chaining operations together
Part of the expressive power of dplyr comes from its ability to chain data processing operations one after the other. The %>% symbol can be used with dplyr functions to chain together operations. The way it works is that the result of all of the expression before the %>% symbol is used as the first argument of the function that comes after the %>% symbol. In the following demonstration, I use the %>% symbol to put together the select and arrange operations:
vehicles.product.arranged <- as_tibble( vehicles %>% ## start with the original data select(make,model,year,cylinders) %>% ## select the columns arrange(make,model,year) ## arrange the rows )
The previous chain of operations starts with the vehicles dataframe containing the original data. The vehicles dataframe is then followed by the %>% symbol, so it is passed as the first argument to the following function, which is the select() function. As such, the first argument of the select...
