Use multiple command chains with piping
问题 EDIT: I reworked the question to make it clearer and integrate what I found by myself Pipes are a great way to make the code more readable when using a single command chain In some cases however, I feel one is forced to be inconsistent to its philosophy, either by creating unnecessary temp variables, mixing piping and embedded parenthesis, or defining custom functions. See this SO question for example, where OP wants to know how to convert colnames to lower case with pipes: Dplyr or Magrittr