R Style Guide

R Style Guide & Function Writing Best Practices

Consistent naming, spacing, structure, and function design for R code

Function Writing Best Practices

Structure and Style

# Good function structure
rescale01 
  filter(year >= 2020) |>
  group_by(category) |>
  summarise(
    mean_value = mean(value),
    count = n()
  )

Assignment

# Good - Use 
  filter(year >= 2020) |>
  mutate(
    new_var = old_var * 2,
    another_var = str_to_lower(text_var)
  ) |>
  summarise(
    mean_value = mean(value),
    .by = category
  )

Comments

# Good - Comments explain WHY, not WHAT
# Calculate running average to smooth noise in sensor data
running_avg  0) {
    stop("Missing columns: ", paste(missing, collapse = ", "))
  }
}

# Avoid - Function does too many things
do_everything = {threshold}.",
      x = "{sum(x = min_value)
  }
  if (!is.null(max_value)) {
    data 
    filter({{ var }} > threshold)
}

# Usage
data |> my_transform(value, threshold = 0.8)

Prefixed Non-Standard Arguments

# Good - Prefix with . to avoid conflicts
group_summary 
    summarise(..., .by = {{ .by }})
}

Consistent Return Types

# Good - Always return tibble
my_function 
    # processing...
    filter(!is.na(value))

  tibble::as_tibble(result)
}

Common Style Mistakes

Avoid These Patterns

# Avoid - Inconsistent spacing
x 0)) {}  # Extra parens
if (x > 0) {}    # Correct

# Avoid - Using T/F instead of TRUE/FALSE
if (x == T) {}     # T can be overwritten
if (x == TRUE) {}  # Correct

# Avoid - Semicolons to separate statements
x  pull(mpg) |> mean()

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: ab604
• Source: ab604/claude-code-r-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.