[R] Quotation marks hinder for loop

[David Winsemius]

> On Oct 13, 2017, at 6:50 AM, y tanaka <marineband2007 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear mailing list members,
> 
> My question is maybe very basic, but I could not find the solution.
> 
> I would like to do the following things
> 
> 1)
> colnames(V1)[2] <- par$V2[1]
> colnames(V2)[2] <- par$V2[2]
> colnames(V3)[2] <- par$V2[3]
> ...
> colnames(V37)[2] <- par$V2[37]

You are making a basic error in planning your analysis. The items V1-V37 should be in a list. Then you just do something like this,

bigVlist <- mapply( function(x,y) {colnames(x)[2] <- y}, bigVlist, par$V2)

> 
> 2)
> V1 <- V1[,-1]
> V2 <- V2[,-1]
> V3 <- V3[,-1]
> ...
> V37 <- V37[,-1]

bigVlist <- lapply( bigVlist , function(x) x[ , -1])

> 
> 3)
> ms <- merge(V1,V2)
> ms <- merge(ms,V3)
> ms <- merge(ms,V4)
> ...
> ms <- merge(ms,V37)

ms <- do.call(merge, bigVlist)

If you had provided a sample of items with equivalent structure to your actual use case we might have been motivated to provide tested code.



> 
> Since these codes take a lot of space in my R console and I am also afraid
> of making any mistakes while typing the codes, I would like to make this
> code simple by using for loop.
> 
> I know that the assign function is useful and another code as follows
> worked well with it:
> for(i in 1:N_var){
>  assign(paste("V", i, sep=""), post_df[Nrange$start[i]:Nrange$end[i],])
> }
> 
> However, I could not find how to apply for loop to 1) - 3) above.
> 
> 1)
>> for (i in 1:N_var){
> +   assign(colnames(paste("V", i, sep=""))[2], par$V2[i])

You cannot embed extraction/indexing functions on the "lefthand side", i.e. the first argument, of an `assign(` operation.

-- 
David.


> + }
> Error in assign(colnames(paste("V", i, sep = ""))[2], par$V2[i]) :
>  invalid first argument
> 
> 2)
>> for(i in 1:N_var){
>  assign(paste("V", i, sep=""), paste("V", i, sep="")[,-1])
> }
> Error in paste("V", i, sep = "")[, -1] : incorrect number of dimensions
> 
> 
> I suppose that it might be important to call object names without quotation
> mark, so
> I tried the noquote function, but it did not change the situation.
> 
> 1)
>> for (i in 1:N_var){
> +   assign(colnames(noquote(paste("V", i, sep=""))[2], par$V2[i]))
> + }
> Error in if (do.NULL) NULL else if (nc > 0L) paste0(prefix, seq_len(nc))
> else character() :
>  argument is not interpretable as logical
> 
> 2)
>> for(i in 1:N_var){
> +   assign(paste("V", i, sep=""), noquote(paste("V", i, sep=""))[,-1])
> + }
> Error in unclass(x)[...] : incorrect number of dimensions
> 
> I would appreciate it if someone would help me.
> 
> Best regards,
> Yohei Tanaka
> ==========================
> Yohei Tanaka
> Tohoku University
> Graduate school of Economics
> Doctoral student
> email: marineband2007 at gmail.com
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA

'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.'   -Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law