How to use R's ellipsis feature when writing your own function?

Question

The R language has a nifty feature for defining functions that can take a variable number of arguments. For example, the function data.frame takes any number of

Answer 1

Just to add to Shane and Dirk's responses: it is interesting to compare

get_list_from_ellipsis1 <- function(...)
{
  list(...)
}
get_list_from_ellipsis1(a = 1:10, b = 2:20) # returns a list of integer vectors

$a
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

$b
 [1]  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

with

get_list_from_ellipsis2 <- function(...)
{
  as.list(substitute(list(...)))[-1L]
}
get_list_from_ellipsis2(a = 1:10, b = 2:20) # returns a list of calls

$a
1:10

$b
2:20

As it stands, either version appears suitable for your purposes in my_ellipsis_function, though the first is clearly simpler.