Practical Data Wrangling

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 ...