Interesting to read all the answers. Personally, I was a bit irked to see that using a combination of assignments using rownames() and colnames() did not work as one canceled what the other had done.
But it turns out if we listed to what John really wanted versus what he said he wanted, then a fairly simple parameterized answer is to add the row and column names when creating the matrix as in: # Create a matrix of size M by N rows, initialiazed to NA # and also add row names that look like row1, row2, ... rowM # as well as column names that look like col1, col2, ... colN # Set the parameters and the rest is a one-liner, wrapped a bit # for legibility: M <- 2 N <- 4 rowpref <- "row" colpref <- "col" myvalues <- matrix(data=NA, nrow=M, ncol=N, dimnames=list(rows=paste("row", seq(M), sep=""), cols=paste("col", seq(N), sep=""))) The resulting value is: > myvalues cols rows col1 col2 col3 col4 row1 NA NA NA NA row2 NA NA NA NA -----Original Message----- From: R-help <r-help-boun...@r-project.org> On Behalf Of Sorkin, John Sent: Tuesday, July 4, 2023 12:17 AM To: Rolf Turner <rolftur...@posteo.net>; Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> Cc: r-help@r-project.org (r-help@r-project.org) <r-help@r-project.org>; Achim Zeileis <achim.zeil...@uibk.ac.at> Subject: Re: [R] Create a variable lenght string that can be used in a dimnames statement My life is complete. I have inspired a fortune! John ________________________________________ From: Rolf Turner <rolftur...@posteo.net> Sent: Monday, July 3, 2023 6:34 PM To: Bert Gunter Cc: Sorkin, John; r-help@r-project.org (r-help@r-project.org); Achim Zeileis Subject: Re: [R] Create a variable lenght string that can be used in a dimnames statement On Mon, 3 Jul 2023 13:40:41 -0700 Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am not going to try to sort out your confusion, as others have > already tried and failed. <SNIP> Fortune nomination!!! cheers, Rolf Turner -- Honorary Research Fellow Department of Statistics University of Auckland Stats. Dep't. (secretaries) phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 89622 Home phone: +64-9-480-4619 ______________________________________________ R-help@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. ______________________________________________ R-help@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.