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Apply functions that return NULL

50xp

In all of the previous exercises, it was assumed that the functions that were applied over vectors and lists actually returned a meaningful result. For example, the tolower() function simply returns the strings with the characters in lowercase. This won't always be the case. Suppose you want to display the structure of every element of a list. You could use the str() function for this, which returns NULL:

lapply(list(1, "a", TRUE), str)

This call actually returns a list, the same size as the input list, containing all NULL values. On the other hand calling

str(TRUE)

on its own prints only the structure of the logical to the console, not NULL. That's because str() uses invisible() behind the scenes, which returns an invisible copy of the return value, NULL in this case. This prevents it from being printed when the result of str() is not assigned.

What will the following code chunk return (split_low is already available in the workspace)? Try to reason about the result before simply executing it in the console!

lapply(split_low, function(x) {
  if (nchar(x[1]) > 5) {
    return(NULL)
  } else {
    return(x[2])
  }
})

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