Hi all, I know this is an idiotic question, but I am trying to iterate through a list of data.frame using ls (I have named the data frames in a way that lets me subset them with ls(pattern="test", for example). But ls returns a character vector. How to I refer to the data frames by their names in the list instead of the actual string? Thanks a bunch. Ken
See ?get And you'll probably also want ?assign On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Lo, Ken <ken.lo at roche.com> wrote:> Hi all, > > I know this is an idiotic question, but I am trying to iterate through a > list of data.frame using ls (I have named the data frames in a way that > lets me subset them with ls(pattern="test", for example). But ls > returns a character vector. How to I refer to the data frames by their > names in the list instead of the actual string? > > Thanks a bunch. > > Ken > > _________________________________-- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org
See ?get However, it sounds like you might look at storing your data.frames in an object of class "list". Then you can do things like: alist <- list(df1 = data.frame(a = 1:10, b = 2:11), df2 = data.frame(a = 2:100, b = 3:101)) lapply(alist, summary) If you wrote your own function to do things to data.frames, you could use lapply with your own function. It's a pretty powerful way of doing a lot with a few lines of code, and you don't have to worry about how many objects there are, what they are called, or using 'get', etc. Lo, Ken wrote:> Hi all, > > I know this is an idiotic question, but I am trying to iterate through a > list of data.frame using ls (I have named the data frames in a way that > lets me subset them with ls(pattern="test", for example). But ls > returns a character vector. How to I refer to the data frames by their > names in the list instead of the actual string? > > Thanks a bunch. > > Ken > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Its a FAQ: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#How-can-I-turn-a-string-into-a-variable_003f On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Lo, Ken <ken.lo at roche.com> wrote:> Hi all, > > I know this is an idiotic question, but I am trying to iterate through a > list of data.frame using ls (I have named the data frames in a way that > lets me subset them with ls(pattern="test", for example). But ls > returns a character vector. How to I refer to the data frames by their > names in the list instead of the actual string? > > Thanks a bunch. > > Ken > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >