Occasionally when I am jotting some code I find myself creating several temporary variables with the intention of later getting rid of them. These variables involve quick names that are defined in a local scope and get quite confusing out of their context. If the project expands, however, I find myself with three options for playing with the next level of the project: remember what I’ve already used and try to avoid it, rename all of the temporary variables (e.g. rewrite the code of the base level of the project), or wipe the variables for use later. This decision is usually made based on how the project is going. If the project is going well, I’ll go back and dutifully rewrite the initial code to track variables in a more unique way. If the project is still a bit shaky, I will clear the variable names that I tend to use as temporary variables and keep exploring. Remembering variable names never turns out well for me; I inevitably forget that a variable was defined in a previous section, use it thinking I had redefined it (when I didn’t), and wonder at the strange results I get.

Clearing all variables names can be a task, though. The problem comes as, in order to move on to the next stage, I actually wish to keep a few of the variables and get rid of all of the rest. After playing with a few ideas (removing the unwanted variables one at a time, writing out the variables that I wanted to keep, etc.), I decided on the idea of writing a

keep

  function. The

keep

 function does just what it says: given a list of variables as arguments, it keeps those variables and removes the rest. For an example, consider the vectors “x” and “y”, which are combined to give a matrix “initMod.” Using  

keep(initMod)

  keeps the matrix and will eliminate all other objects in the global environment (including “x” and “y”), allowing me to reuse the variable names “x” and “y” as temporary variables again (say, for “modifiedMod”).

Code for

keep

 can be found on GitHub, here. Note that the function will self delete if defined in the global environment, so add in a segment to always leave

keep

. You could also simply grab the containing personal package (myStuff) off of GitHub using the code below.

if(!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools", dependencies=TRUE)
devtools::install_github("flor3652/myStuff")
library(myStuff)

Note that when using the function from the package you don’t have to worry about it being deleted as it isn’t in the global environment.