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x: y %<-% c(0, 1)

What's to be excited about?

zeallot allows multiple or unpacking assignment in R. With zeallot you can tighten code with explicit variable names, unpack pieces of a lengthy list or the entirety of a small list, de-structure and assign object elements, or do a little of all of these at once.

install.packages('zeallot')

Getting Started

A simple example using the purrr package. The purrr::safely function returns a "safe" version of a function. From the safely documentation examples,

safe_log <- purrr::safely(log)
safe_log(10)
#> $result
#> [1] 2.302585
#>
#> $error
#> NULL

safe_log("a")
#> $result
#> NULL
#>
#> $error
#> <simpleError in .f(...): non-numeric argument to mathematical function>

A safe function always returns a list of two elements. Instead of throwing an error, the error element of the return list is set and the value element is NULL. If no error occurs then the result element is set to the return value of the original, unsafe, function and the error element is NULL. In either case an error is not raised.

Safe functions are a great way to build flexible, reactive code. However, dealing with a return value that is always a list could prove tedious. Enter zeallot.

With zeallot we can unpack our safe function's return value into two explicit variables and avoid dealing the list return value all together.

{res: err} %<-% safe_log(10)
res
#> [1] 2.302585
err
#> NULL

zeallot defines the unpacking operator %<-%. On the left-hand side of the operator we create a list of bare variable names using colons and braces. These variables do not have to be previously defined. On the right-hand side is our vector, list, or other R objec to unpack.

After running the assignment expression on the first example line the res and err variables are assigned the result and error values from our safe function's list return.

For more on this example, other examples, and a thorough introduction to zeallot check out the vignette on unpacking assignment.