[R] reading in tab delimited data in a loop

[Douglas Bates]

"Edmond Ng" <Edmond.Ng at lshtm.ac.uk> writes:

> Dear all, 
> 
> I need to read in 4 sets of tab delimited data in a  loop. The 4 data sets are called "simu1.dat", "simu2.dat" and so on. I know what I need on the righthand side of the read.table expression but I can't the left hand side of it to work (see the line in bold below). Can you kindly help? Many thanks. 
> 
> simu1 <- matrix(0,30,3)
> simu2 <- matrix(0,30,3)
> simu3 <- matrix(0,30,3)
> simu4 <- matrix(0,30,3)
> 
> for (i in 1:4) {
> simu[i] <- read.table( paste("simu",i,".dat",sep="") )
> }

Use paste to generate the name and assign to do the assignment

for (i in 1:4) {
  assign(paste('simu', i), read.table( paste("simu",i,".dat",sep="")))
}