Use vapply

Before you get your hands dirty with the third and last apply function that you'll learn about in this intermediate R course, let's take a look at its syntax. The function is called vapply(), and it has the following syntax:

vapply(X, FUN, FUN.VALUE, ..., USE.NAMES = TRUE)

Over the elements inside X, the function FUN is applied. The FUN.VALUE argument expects a template for the return argument of this function FUN. USE.NAMES is TRUE by default; in this case vapply() tries to generate a named array, if possible.

For the next set of exercises, you'll be working on the temp list again, that contains 7 numerical vectors of length 5. We also coded a function basics() that takes a vector, and returns a named vector of length 3, containing the minimum, mean and maximum value of the vector respectively.

Apply the function basics() over the list of temperatures, temp, using vapply(). This time, you can use numeric(3) to specify the FUN.VALUE argument.

Exercise

Use vapply

Instructions