CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rlist
vitale232
vitale232

Reputation: 615

Create a separate variable for each element of a list

I have a list of data frames, which was produced from reading in 25 .csv files at once. I would like to unlist the data frames to begin a spatial analysis. That is, I would like to have individual data frames for each element of the list.

I have tried unlist(), but it does not produce the result I want. I have also tried an approach with lapply(), but it produces an error. Here's what I've tried:

x <- 1:3
y <- 4:6

l <- lapply(1:2, function(x){data.frame(x, y)})

lapply(1:length(l), function(i){paste('df', i, sep = '') <- data.frame(l[[i]])})

The problem seems to be in assigning the data frame to the pasted name. Wrapping it with as.character() did not help.

This does work:

"df1" <- data.frame(l[[1]])

It seems the problem is somewhere in the output of my paste() function, but the output has str() 'chr'. Any ideas how I can make my approach work? Is there a cleaner way to unlist my data frames?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2755

Answers (1)

thelatemail
thelatemail

Reputation: 93803

One way of doing it:

list2env(setNames(l,paste0("df",seq_along(l))), envir = parent.frame())

Though I would heed @baptiste 's advice before it is too late and avoid doing this. Why? Because in two days time you'll find yourself trapped using get() and paste and messy loops to try to apply a function to all of your datasets at once. If you keep them in a list you can just do lapply(l,functionname).

Upvotes: 6

Related Questions