[R] use value in variable to be name of another variable

[Matthew]

Hi Jim,

    Wow ! And it does exactly what I was looking for.  Thank you very much.

That assign function is pretty nice. I should become more familiar with it.

Matthew


On 7/11/2016 5:59 PM, Jim Lemon wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
> This question is a bit mysterious as we don't know what the object
> "chr" is. However, have a look at this and see if it is close to what
> you want to do.
>
> # set up a little matrix of character values
> tTargTFS<-matrix(paste("A",rep(1:4,each=4),"B",rep(1:4,4),sep=""),ncol=4)
> # try the assignment on the first row and column
> assign(tTargTFS[1,1],tTargTFS[-1,1])
> # see what it looks like - okay
> A1B1
> # run the assignment over the matrix
> for(i in 1:4) assign(tTargTFS[1,i],tTargTFS[-1,i])
> # see what the variables look like
> A1B1
> A2B1
> A3B1
> A4B1
>
> It does what I would expect.
>
> Jim
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Matthew
> <mccormack at molbio.mgh.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> I want to get a value that has been assigned to a variable, and then use
>> that value to be the name of a variable.
>>
>> For example,
>>
>> tTargTFS[1,1]
>> # returns:
>>                  V1
>> "AT1G01010"
>>
>> Now, I want to make AT1G01010 the name of a variable:
>> AT1G01010 <- tTargTFS[-1,1]
>>
>> Then, go to the next tTargTFS[1,2]. Which produces
>>                 V1
>> "AT1G01030"
>> And then,
>> AT1G01030 <- tTargTFS[-1,2]
>>
>> I want to do this up to tTargTFS[1, 2666], so I want to do this in a script
>> and not manually.
>> tTargTFS is a list of 2: chr [1:265, 1:2666], but I also have the data in a
>> data frame of 265 observations of 2666 variables, if this data structure
>> makes things easier.
>>
>> My initial attempts are not working. Starting with a test data structure
>> that is a little simpler I have tried:
>> for (i in 1:4)
>> { ATG <- tTargTFS[1, i]
>> assign(cat(ATG), tTargTFS[-1, i]) }
>>
>> Matthew
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.