Assigning to objects using names created from a vector in R

Question

I have two vectors:

years<-c(1995:1999)
values<-c(1:5)

I want to create five objects, named "Obj1995", "Obj1996" etc., and assign them the values in values in that order, so that Obj1995==1, Obj1996==2 etc.

I tried using assign():

assign(paste0("Obj",years),values)

but that's not vectorized, so it only created one object, containing all of values:

In assign(paste0("Obj",years),values) :
  only the first element is used as variable name

Is there a way of achieving my goal without a for-loop?

Fyi, the usual advice is: don't do that. Both don't create a bunch of objects that naturally fit together in one object; and don't embed data (in this case years) in strings. That is, yr_DF = data.frame(yr = years, v = values) or similar... — Frank
– Frank, Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 18:23
Thanks, I'm aware of this advice, and have taken it into consideration. The actual use case isn't as simple as the example, and while I could put everything into a list, having multiple-dimension arrays as list objects just becomes too cumbersome to reference for my needs. — iod
– iod, Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 18:29

akrun · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-18 18:12:59Z

4

We can use list2env on a named list

list2env(as.list(setNames(values, paste0("Obj", years))), envir = .GlobalEnv)

Obj1995
#[1] 1
Obj1996
#[1] 2

The assign can be used with a for loop

rm(list = ls(pattern = "^Obj\\d{4}$")) # remove any objects 
for(i in seq_along(values)) assign(paste0("Obj", yearsi]), value = values[i])

edited Oct 18, 2018 at 18:12

answered Oct 18, 2018 at 18:05

akrun

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1 Comment

iod Over a year ago

Thanks! Yes, I figured out the for-loop option myself, but wanted to figure out a vectorized alternative. Your answer flipped years and values, but I got the gist of it, and got it to work. I actually saw list2env in another answer, but it didn't have the satNames part, and I couldn't figure that bit out.

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