Generate Vectors With For Loop in R

Question

Incredibly basic question. I'm brand new to R. I feel bad for asking, but also like someone will crush it:

I'm trying to generate a number of vectors with a for loop. Each with an unique name, numbered by iteration. The code I'm attaching throws an error, but I think it explains what I'm trying to do in principle fairly well.

Thanks in advance.

vectorBuilder <- function(num){
for (x in num){
  paste0("vec",x) <- rnorm(10000, mean = 0, sd = 1)}
}

numSeries <- 1:10
vectorBuilder(numSeries)

Ronak Shah · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-13 06:54:33Z

1

You can write the function to return a named list :

create_vector <- function(n) {
    setNames(replicate(n, rnorm(10000), simplify = FALSE), 
             paste0('vec', seq_len(n)))
}

and call it as :

data <- create_vector(10)

data will have list of length 10 with each element having a vector of size 10000. It is better to keep data in this list instead of creating lot of vectors in global environment. However, if you still want separate vectors you can use list2env :

list2env(data, .GlobalEnv)

answered Nov 13, 2020 at 6:54

Ronak Shah

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1 Comment

nghess Over a year ago

Thanks so much. Appreciate the simplicity and clarity. Hopefully this will help out another noob someday soon :)

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