Pass R variable to RODBC's sqlQuery? [duplicate]

Is there any way to pass a variable defined within R to the sqlQuery function within the RODBC package?

Specifically, I need to pass such a variable to either a scalar/table-valued function, a stored procedure, and/or perhaps the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement.

For example, let:

x <- 1 ## user-defined

Then,

example <- sqlQuery(myDB,"SELECT * FROM dbo.my_table_fn (x)")

Or...

example2 <- sqlQuery(myDB,"SELECT * FROM dbo.some_random_table AS foo WHERE foo.ID = x")

Or...

example3 <- sqlQuery(myDB,"EXEC dbo.my_stored_proc (x)")

Obviously, none of these work, but I'm thinking that there's something that enables this sort of functionality.

Build the string you intend to pass. So instead of

example <- sqlQuery(myDB,"SELECT * FROM dbo.my_table_fn (x)")

do

example <- sqlQuery(myDB, paste("SELECT * FROM dbo.my_table_fn (", 
                                x, ")", sep=""))

which will fill in the value of x.

If you use sprintf, you can very easily build the query string using variable substitution. For extra ease-of-use, if you pre-parse that query string (I'm using stringr) you can write it over multiple lines in your code.

e.g.

q1 <- sprintf("
               SELECT basketid, count(%s)
               FROM %s
               GROUP BY basketid
              "
              ,item_barcode
              ,dbo.sales
              )
q1 <- str_replace_all(str_replace_all(q1,"\n",""),"\\s+"," ")
df <- sqlQuery(shopping_database, q1)

Side-note and hat-tip to another R chap

Recently I found I wanted to make the variable substitution even simpler by using something like Python's string.format() function, which lets you reuse and reorder variables within the string

e.g.

$: w = "He{0}{0}{1} W{1}r{0}d".format("l","o")
$: print(w)
"Hello World"

However, this function doesn't appear to exist in R, so I asked around on Twitter, and a very helpful chap @kevin_ushey replied with his own custom function to be used in R. Check it out!