How to name variables on the fly?

r assign r-faq
Maiasaura picture Maiasaura · Apr 21, 2010 · Viewed 99.6k times · Source

Is it possible to create new variable names on the fly?

I'd like to read data frames from a list into new variables with numbers at the end. Something like orca1, orca2, orca3...

If I try something like

paste("orca",i,sep="")=list_name[[i]]

I get this error

target of assignment expands to non-language object

Is there another way around this?

Answer

Shane picture Shane · Apr 21, 2010

Use assign:

assign(paste("orca", i, sep = ""), list_name[[i]])

Related questions

How to assign from a function which returns more than one value?

Still trying to get into the R logic... what is the "best" way to unpack (on LHS) the results from a function returning multiple values? I can't do this apparently: R> functionReturningTwoValues <- function() { return(c(1, 2)) } R> …

Read More
R: Assign variable labels of data frame columns

I am struggling with variable labels of data.frame columns. Say I have the following data frame (part of much larger data frame): data <- data.frame(age = c(21, 30, 25, 41, 29, 33), sex = factor(c(1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2), labels = c("Female", "Male"))) # I also have …

Read More
Assign multiple new variables on LHS in a single line

I want to assign multiple variables in a single line in R. Is it possible to do something like this? values # initialize some vector of values (a, b) = values[c(2,4)] # assign a and b to values at 2 and 4 indices of …

Read More