Question

Instead of doing

a <- loadBigObject("a")
b <- loadBigObject("b")

I’d like to call a function like

loadBigObjects(list("a","b"))

And be able to access the a and b objects.

Answer 1

It is not clear what loadBigObjects() does or where it will look for a and b. How does it load the objects from file or sourcing code?

There are lots of options in general:

• sys.source() allows an R file to be sourced to a given environment
• load() which will load an .Rdata file to a given environment
• assign() in combination with any object created by loadBigObjects() or a call to readRDS() can also load an object to a given environment.

From within your function, you’ll want to specify the environment in which to load objects as the Global Environment by using globalenv(). If you don’t do that then the object will only exist in the evaluation frame of the running loadBigObjects(). E.g.

loadBigObjects <- function(list) {
    lapply(list, function(x) assign(x, readRDS(x), envir = globalenv()))
}

(as per your comment to @GSee’s Answer, and assuming the list("a","b") is sufficient information for readRDS() to locate and open the object.