Combining pipes and the magrittr dot (.) placeholder

Question

I am fairly new to R and I am trying to understand the %>% operator and the usage of the \" .\" (dot) placeholder. As a simple example the follo

Answer 1

The "problem" is that magrittr has a short-hand notation for anonymous functions:

. %>% is.data.frame

is roughly the same as

function(.) is.data.frame(.)

In other words, when the dot is the (left-most) left-hand side, the pipe has special behaviour.

You can escape the behaviour in a few ways, e.g.

(.) %>% is.data.frame

or any other way where the LHS is not identical to . In this particular example, this may seem as undesirable behaviuour, but commonly in examples like this there's really no need to pipe the first expression, so is.data.frame(.) is as expressive as . %>% is.data.frame, and examples like

data %>% 
some_action %>% 
lapply(. %>% some_other_action %>% final_action)

can be argued to be clearner than

data %>% 
some_action %>%
lapply(function(.) final_action(some_other_action(.)))

Answer 2

This is the problem:

. = data.frame(x = 5)
a = data.frame(x = 5)

a %>% is.data.frame
#[1] TRUE
. %>% is.data.frame
#Functional sequence with the following components:
#
# 1. is.data.frame(.)
#
#Use 'functions' to extract the individual functions. 

Looks like a bug to me, but dplyr experts can chime in.

A simple workaround in your expression is to do .[] %>% is.data.frame.