[R] Help with looping

[Mark Sharp]

Alexandra,

According to the documentation (?readLines), readLines returns a character vector with one line from the file being read in each element of the vector. You can put the character vector from each file (as represented by a year designation in your example) in a separate list element. You want to count the elements in the list starting at 1 not 2000. The integers from years[i] get converted to strings in sprintf in the code below.

years <- 2000:2003
Data <- list(length(years))

for (i in seq_along(years)){
   #script for downloading each year
   Data[i] = readLines(sprintf('file/%s',years[i]))
}
# Data[1] will have the character vector made up of the lines in 'file/2000'.

Mark

R. Mark Sharp, Ph.D.
Director of Primate Records Database
Southwest National Primate Research Center
Texas Biomedical Research Institute
P.O. Box 760549
San Antonio, TX 78245-0549
Telephone: (210)258-9476
e-mail: msharp at TxBiomed.org







> On Feb 17, 2015, at 12:15 PM, Alexandra Catena <amc5981 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I need help with a for loop and printing data.  I want to loop through a
> few years and print the data from each year stacked on top of each other.
> For example,
>
> for (i in 2000:2003){
> #script for downloading each year
> Data = readLines(sprintf('file/%4i,i))
> }
>
> It only prints out the data from the last year.  Also, I tried
>
> Data[i] =  readLines(sprintf('file/%4i,i))
>
> but it says:
>
> "number of items to replace is not a multiple of replacement length"
>
> How do I get it to not replace each year of data? I have R version 2.15.1
>
> Thanks,
> Alexandra
>
>       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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R. Mark Sharp, Ph.D.
Director of Primate Records Database
Southwest National Primate Research Center
Texas Biomedical Research Institute
P.O. Box 760549
San Antonio, TX 78245-0549
Telephone: (210)258-9476
e-mail: msharp at TxBiomed.org








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