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I am trying to use the pymer4 package in python for Multi-Level Models, and I have to pass an "R-style formula specifying the model". I understand that it looks like:

target ~ varA + varB

However, I have many variables and some of those have numbers at the end of the names, parentheses, and slashes, like:

var1, (var)2, var1/var2

When I create a string like in the first example, I get the following error, indicating a variable with a number as the suffix.

RRuntimeError: Error in str2lang(x) : <text>:1:70: unexpected numeric constant

I know I could change the names, but it is tedious as I have many variables, as well as having a lot of other code that uses the existing names. I have never coded in R so I haven't got a clue how to solve this problem. There must be a way to just specify that the number and other characters are part of the string, no?

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    wrap those "problem@t1c / names" in quotations or backticks. Commented Nov 11 at 21:44
  • Possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/73514811/… Commented Nov 11 at 21:48
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    I was thinking backticks. I don't use pymer4, but I can produce that error with as.formula("var1 ~ (var)2 + var1/var2") and the error does not occur with as.formula("`var1` ~ `(var)2` + `var1/var2`"). While I don't assume that you're calling as.formula or str2lang directly, the backticks should cascade into where the error is being triggered. Commented Nov 12 at 1:29
  • This looks like an xy problem. Your "variable names" don't look like something you should be creating in R or python. Commented Nov 12 at 6:04
  • The brackticks solved the problem! @Roland - I wouldn't usually name variables like this, but these are column names in a DataFrame, so I felt I had a little more freedom in naming them. Commented Nov 12 at 8:05
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