I would like to use the characters in a vector as the names of character objects aiming to get
first as say "d","e","a","t" etc.
tried this approach but am clearly missing some function to apply to x[i]
x <- c("first","second","third"..)
for (i in 1:length(x)) {
x[i] <- sample(letters,4)
}
TIA
The function you are looking for is assign():
> x <- c("first","second","third")
> for (i in 1:length(x)) {
+ assign(x[i], sample(letters,4))
+ }
>
> ls()
[1] "first" "i" "second" "third" "x"
> first
[1] "t" "d" "u" "j"
> second
[1] "o" "i" "p" "l"
> third
[1] "w" "v" "r" "n"
As an alternative, you could build these vectors as different elements of a list:
> mylist <- list()
> for (i in 1:length(x)) {
+ mylist[[x[i]]] <- sample(letters,4)
+ }
> mylist
$first
[1] "e" "l" "y" "d"
$second
[1] "t" "o" "k" "h"
$third
[1] "g" "x" "p" "b"
You don't say what you will be doing with this object. You may get the simplest structure by using a named vector:
names(x) <- x
x[] <- sample(letters, 4)
If you do not use the paired bracket on the LHS, the whole vector gets replaced and the names will be lost. You can now access the values with quoted names:
> x
first second third fourth
"w" "c" "r" "x"
> x["second"]
second
"c"
