Feature request: Non-syntactic names in `survfit2` objects

[mattsecrest]

I always wished survfit objects accepted non-syntactic names. Maybe something worth adding to survfit2?

library(ggsurvfit)
library(tibble)

df <- tibble(
  os_months = abs(rnorm(100, 12, .5)),
  os_event = rbinom(100, 1, .5),
  group = sample(c("group 1", "group 2"), 100, replace = TRUE),
  `group non-syntactic` = group
)

# This works
survfit2(
  Surv(os_months, os_event) ~ group,
  data = df
)

# This does not work
survfit2(
  Surv(os_months, os_event) ~ `group non-syntactic`,
  data = df
)

Even fixing the error message could be nice, as it is quite cryptic:

Error in `[.data.frame`(mf, ll) : undefined columns selected

[ddsjoberg]

Hmmmm, we could say that survfit2() does accept these kinds of names. But the error you're seeing is what happens when we pass those args to survival::survfit() 😉

Are you thinking we could parse the formula looking for these names before passing to survival::survfit() and give a warning before the error message appears?

[mattsecrest]

I see. Since this is ultimately thrown by survival, let's see if we can fix it there instead: https://github.com/therneau/survival/issues/232

[ddsjoberg]

Hey hey @mattsecrest ! I am going to go ahead and close this since it'll automatically work when survival is updated