CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
sarah
sarah

Reputation: 247

How to create automatic text file from a list in R?

If I have list element containing multiple data frames, and I want to write them as individual text files on my disk by names NP1 , NP2, NP3, how can I do that?

I used the following,

lapply(lst1,write.table)

But this doesn't solve the issue. How can I do it? Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 730

Answers (1)

Rich Scriven
Rich Scriven

Reputation: 99331

Here are two ways. One with a for loop and one with mapply

Set up a list of data frames:

lst1 <- list(data.frame(x = 1:5, y = letters[1:5]),
             data.frame(z = 6:10, w = LETTERS[1:5]))

Loop through the list with a for loop:

for(i in seq_along(lst1)) {
    write.table(lst1[[i]], paste0("NP", i, ".txt"))
}

Check the result:

read.table("NP1.txt")
read.table("NP2.txt")

Using mapply:

nm <- paste0("NP", seq_along(lst1), ".txt")  ## create the file names
mapply(write.table, lst1, file = nm)         ## write the files
# [[1]]
# NULL
#
# [[2]]
# NULL

Note that if you don't want the NULL values that come as a printed result, you can wrap the call in invisible

invisible(mapply(write.table, lst1, file = nm))

Upvotes: 2

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