[R] Print list to text file with list elements names

[William Dunlap]

You want to put
   lapply(myList, print)
inside a call to invisible
   invisible(lapply(myList, print))

(or put the whole sink(file)/lapply(...)/sink() sequence into a
function or use tmp<-lapply(...)
so autoprinting is suppressed)

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 10:41 AM, Ingrid Charvet <Ingrid.Charvet at rms.com> wrote:
> Hi Bill, thanks for your suggestions.
>
> Regarding the list elements names, your idea works well - thank you.
>
> However, my first issue is not resolved. I omitted the second sink
> statement, and R still created a text file with duplicate list elements.
> Then I omitted both sink statements (keeping only the lapply), but obviously
> then no text file is created at all (although it does "print" properly on
> the R console) ...
>
> I also tried:
>
>> func <- function(i) {
>> write.table(inventory[[i]],file=sprintf("test_new%d",i)) }
>> lapply(1:10,func)
>
> But here of course I get 10 different text files (one per list element) when
> what I would like is to have them all in one file...
>
> Ingrid
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Dunlap [mailto:wdunlap at tibco.com]
> Sent: 01 October 2014 15:54
> To: Ingrid Charvet
> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Print list to text file with list elements names
>
> Omit the sink() statements to see what is happening -
> lapply(myList,print) prints
> each item in the list and then the output of lapply is printed via the
> autoprinting mechanism.
> If you put this into a function or saved the return value of lapply into a
> variable or wrapped the call to lapply in a call to invisible() then the
> autoprinting would not happen.
>
> You said that you wanted the name each list item printed before the item.
> print(myList) would do that, but I assume you've already tried that and
> didn't like the format. You can get your own formatting of the name with
> something like
>> myList <- list(First=data.frame(x=1:2,y=letters[1:2]),
> Second=data.frame(x=1:3,z=LETTERS[24:26]))
>> invisible(lapply(seq_along(myList), function(i){ cat(sep="", "\n",
>> names(myList)[i], ":\n") ; print(myList[[i]])}))
>
> First:
> x y
> 1 1 a
> 2 2 b
>
> Second:
> x z
> 1 1 X
> 2 2 Y
> 3 3 Z
>
>
>
>
> Bill Dunlap
> TIBCO Software
> wdunlap tibco.com
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Ingrid Charvet <Ingrid.Charvet at rms.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I want to write a list of data frames to a text file and preserve the
>> names given to the list elements (I am using R 3.1.0).
>>
>> I tried:
>>
>> setNames(myList, myNames) # myNames is a vector of char elements same
>> length as myList
>>
>> sink(sprintf("%s",filename))
>> lapply(myList,print)
>> sink()
>>
>> And here I have two problems:
>>
>> 1. R writes each element of my list to the text file twice, so for example
>> if I have a list with 2 elements (i.e. data frames) in it, it will write 4:
>> in order data frame 1, data frame 2, data frame 1, data frame 2.
>>
>> 2. The names of list elements do not print to the text file.
>>
>> Any suggestions to solve these issues would be appreciated!
>> Many thanks,
>>
>> Ingrid
>>
>>
>>
>>
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