Creating many variables in a loop (R)

Question

I want to a go through 'paragraphs' a list of however many paragraphs and save each individual one as a new variable and tried writing this code block and am getting the following errors:

for (value in paragraphs) {
     nam <- paste("p", value, sep = ".")
     value <- assign(nam, 1:value)
}

Error in 1:value : NA/NaN argument
In addition: Warning message:
In assign(nam, 1:value) : NAs introduced by coercion

Any advice as to where to go from here?

Answer 1

I think you are trying to create a number of variables called p1 , p2 , p3 etc, each with the corresponding paragraph written to it. In that case, the following should work:

for (value in seq_along(paragraphs)) {
     nam <- paste("p", value, sep = ".")
     value <- assign(nam, paragraphs[value])
}

However, it is not a great idea to write a bunch of variables to the global workspace, and it would be better if the paragraphs were all in a named list. You say they are in a list already, but it's not clear if you mean a an actual R list or just a vector. If they are in a list already, you could do:

p <- setNames(paragraphs, paste0("p", seq_along(paragraphs)))

This would allow you to access each paragraph as p$p1 , p$p2 etc.

If the paragraphs are in a vector rather than a list, you could do

p <- setNames(as.list(paragraphs), paste0("p", seq_along(paragraphs)))

to get the same result.