An R-function for Creating a String

I've done this before when I am working with folks or students who dont commonly use R and I dont trust that they know the difference between entering "this" and this. So to save me some repeated explaining, I generally add a work-around if-then statement that separates the substitute to capture the input without evaluating with deparse unless needed. A generalized example is something like this:

dummyFunction <- \(x) {
  x <-substitute(x)
  if(is.symbol(x)){
    paste0("Testing ", deparse(x))
  }
  else {
    paste0("Testing ", x)
    }
}

dummyFunction(this)
# [1] "Testing this"
dummyFunction("this")
# [1] "Testing this"

To be clear, this is not good practice for solid, reliable, or safe coding. But it has saved me plenty of of emails for non-critical tasks :)

However, in your specific case your desired input dummyFunction(2025-B3) is never going to be possible in R because unquoted objects can’t start with a number/digit, so 2025-B3 will always be parsed as arithmetic (2025 - B3), not as a single symbol. You will need to pull the quote() to the function call, i.e., dummyFunction(quote(2025-B3)). You will also need to gsub that text out as well, so:

dummyFunction <- \(x) {
  y <- substitute(x)
  if(!is.character(y)){
    gsub("\\bquote\\(|\\)", "",
    gsub(" ", "", gsub("\"", "", deparse(y)))
    )
  }
  else {
    gsub(" ", "", gsub("\"", "", x))
    }
}

dummyFunction(quote(2025-B3))
# [1] "2025-B3"

dummyFunction("2025-B3")
# [1] "2025-B3"

Note that I changed is.symbol() to !is.character() here because y <- substitute(x) becomes the expression quote(2025 - B3) (a call, not a symbol).

Importantly, this will only work on inputs like quote(2025-B3) and NOT on quote(2025-01A) because B3 is a valid variable name (even though its not defined), so 2025-B3 is legal syntax (R thinks "2025 minus something, somewhere called B3"). However, R does not like digits to start names and so 01A is not a valid number or name, so quote(2025-01A) is invalid syntax and never reaches the function at all.

Hopefully for these reasons you can see the moral of the story is that you shouldn't do this.