How to Use a Script or Function

Abstract

While scripts are just listings of code stored outside of R, functions are objects of the function mode and are stored in the workspace. Most functions require specific kinds of arguments, which must be input into the function correctly. For example, if a function calls for a matrix and a data frame is input, the function will return an error. Since external tables are often read into the R workspace as data frames, using a data frame for a matrix is quite a common error. This chapter covers an example of using a script to do a simple mining of Twitter tweets, as well as how to call a function, use arguments in a function, and access the output of a function.