mapply Apply a Function to Multiple List or Vector Arguments

Description

mapply is a multivariate version of sapply. mapply applies FUN to the first elements of each ... argument, the second elements, the third elements, and so on. Arguments are recycled if necessary.

Usage

mapply(FUN, ..., MoreArgs = NULL, SIMPLIFY = TRUE,
       USE.NAMES = TRUE)

Arguments

FUN	function to apply, found via match.fun.
...	arguments to vectorize over (vectors or lists of strictly positive length, or all of zero length). See also ‘Details’.
MoreArgs	a list of other arguments to FUN.
SIMPLIFY	logical or character string; attempt to reduce the result to a vector, matrix or higher dimensional array; see the simplify argument of sapply.
USE.NAMES	logical; use the names of the first ... argument, or if that is an unnamed character vector, use that vector as the names.

Details

mapply calls FUN for the values of ... (re-cycled to the length of the longest, unless any have length zero), followed by the arguments given in MoreArgs. The arguments in the call will be named if ... or MoreArgs are named.

Arguments with classes in ... will be accepted, and their subsetting and length methods will be used.

Value

A list, or for SIMPLIFY = TRUE, a vector, array or list.

See Also

sapply, after which mapply() is modelled.

outer, which applies a vectorized function to all combinations of two arguments.

Examples

mapply(rep, 1:4, 4:1)

mapply(rep, times = 1:4, x = 4:1)

mapply(rep, times = 1:4, MoreArgs = list(x = 42))

mapply(function(x, y) seq_len(x) + y,
       c(a =  1, b = 2, c = 3),  # names from first
       c(A = 10, B = 0, C = -10))

word <- function(C, k) paste(rep.int(C, k), collapse = "")
utils::str(mapply(word, LETTERS[1:6], 6:1, SIMPLIFY = FALSE))