Could you provide a reproducible example, and the error message that you get?
From your code, I suspect the problem is your use of .(1,2), what is the (1,2) supposed to be? When defining a formula, . is a shorthand to mean "all other variables", but typically it's not itself a function or operator.
So, using mtcars and lm() for a reproducible example:
form1 <- mpg ~ .
lm(form1, data = mtcars)
#>
#> Call:
#> lm(formula = form1, data = mtcars)
#>
#> Coefficients:
#> (Intercept) cyl disp hp drat wt
#> 12.30337 -0.11144 0.01334 -0.02148 0.78711 -3.71530
#> qsec vs am gear carb
#> 0.82104 0.31776 2.52023 0.65541 -0.19942
form2 <- mpg ~ .(1,2)
lm(form2, data = mtcars)
#> Error in .(1, 2): could not find function "."
The first one automatically replaces . with all variables, the second one is an error.
If your goal is to use all but a few variables (and you've been using (1,2) to try to subset them), you can use a more explicit approach:
vars_present <- names(mtcars)
vars_present
#> [1] "mpg" "cyl" "disp" "hp" "drat" "wt" "qsec" "vs" "am" "gear"
#> [11] "carb"
vars_to_keep <- vars_present[-(1:3)]
vars_to_keep
#> [1] "hp" "drat" "wt" "qsec" "vs" "am" "gear" "carb"
vars_to_keep_text <- paste(vars_to_keep, collapse = " + ")
form3 <- as.formula(paste("mpg", "~", vars_to_keep_text))
form3
#> mpg ~ hp + drat + wt + qsec + vs + am + gear + carb
lm(form3, data = mtcars)
#>
#> Call:
#> lm(formula = form3, data = mtcars)
#>
#> Coefficients:
#> (Intercept) hp drat wt qsec vs
#> 13.80810 -0.01225 0.88894 -2.60968 0.63983 0.08786
#> am gear carb
#> 2.42418 0.69390 -0.61286
Created on 2025-03-12 with reprex v2.1.0