[R] Create vector of data frames

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/19/2008 11:27 AM, Brigid Mooney wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm sorry I haven't been able to find anything that will help me with this
> problem, and I'm still pretty new to R - so any help here is greatly
> appreciated!
> 
> I am looking to create a vector in a sequential process where each entry in
> the vector is a data frame, for example:
> 
> 
> days <- 3
> for (i in 1:days)
>   {
>     FOO[i] <- data.frame(x=c(i, i+1, i+2), y=c(i, i*i, i*i*i))
>   }
> 
> but when I try this, I get the error "object "FOO" not found".
> 
> I tried to avoid this by concatenating blank data frames to create a shell
> for FOO via:
> 
> FOO <- rep(data.frame(), times=days)

You want to create FOO as a "list", which is the generic vector type in 
R.  That is:

FOO <- list()
days <- 3
for (i in 1:days)
   {
     FOO[[i]] <- data.frame(x=c(i, i+1, i+2), y=c(i, i*i, i*i*i))
   }

Note the use of [[]] indexing on FOO:  FOO[i] would be a list shortened 
to just one element; FOO[[i]] is that element.  (This distinction only 
matters when working with types like lists.  There's no such thing as a 
numeric value that's not in a numeric vector, so x[[2]] and x[2] are the 
same thing if x is numeric.)

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> before the other lines, but then I get lots of errors relating to replacing
> 0 rows with 3 rows.
> 
> 
> Needless to say, the data frames I am actually dealing with are quite a bit
> larger than listed here - so I wanted to get the process working on a toy
> example first.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> for (i in 1:3)
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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