A post on here a day back has me wondering how to assign values to multiple objects in the global environment from within a function. This is my attempt using lapply
(assign
may be safer than <<-
but I have never actually used it and am not familiar with it).
#fake data set
df <- data.frame(
x.2=rnorm(25),
y.2=rnorm(25),
g=rep(factor(LETTERS[1:5]), 5)
)
#split it into a list of data frames
LIST <- split(df, df$g)
#pre-allot 5 objects in R with class data.frame()
V <- W <- X <- Y <- Z <- data.frame()
#attempt to assign the data frames in the LIST to the objects just created
lapply(seq_along(LIST), function(x) c(V, W, X, Y, Z)[x] <<- LIST[[x]])
Please feel free to shorten any/all parts of my code to make this work (or work better/faster).
Update of 2018-10-10:
The most succinct way to carry out this specific task is to use list2env()
like so:
## Create an example list of five data.frames
df <- data.frame(x = rnorm(25),
g = rep(factor(LETTERS[1:5]), 5))
LIST <- split(df, df$g)
## Assign them to the global environment
list2env(LIST, envir = .GlobalEnv)
## Check that it worked
ls()
## [1] "A" "B" "C" "D" "df" "E" "LIST"
Original answer, demonstrating use of assign()
You're right that assign()
is the right tool for the job. Its envir
argument gives you precise control over where assignment takes place -- control that is not available with either <-
or <<-
.
So, for example, to assign the value of X
to an object named NAME
in the the global environment, you would do:
assign("NAME", X, envir = .GlobalEnv)
In your case:
df <- data.frame(x = rnorm(25),
g = rep(factor(LETTERS[1:5]), 5))
LIST <- split(df, df$g)
NAMES <- c("V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z")
lapply(seq_along(LIST),
function(x) {
assign(NAMES[x], LIST[[x]], envir=.GlobalEnv)
}
)
ls()
[1] "df" "LIST" "NAMES" "V" "W" "X" "Y" "Z"