I have a data frame that includes several columns representing variables and variables names are indicated at the top row of the data frame. That is, I had a csv file where variable names were stored in the top row, and when I imported the csv file to R, R created a data frame that appears with the name rwrdatafile (custom name I gave) where I can see all the variables with their names on the top row in RStudio. For example, one of the columns stores wage data and I can create a stand alone data frame (shall I call it a vector data frame?) for wage, but do this for all variables.
That is, I can execute the command wage = rwrdatafile[,1,drop=FALSE] which nicely creates wage and RStudio shows it as data in its environment window and if I click on it, I can inspect it in a spread sheet like view and work with that data say in regression analysis. The problem is that there are many variables stored in the data frame rwrdatafile, and it is very tedious to repeat the above mentioned routine for each variable. Hence I attempted to write a for loop for this but it helped to no avail. In particular, I tried for (i in 1:k){ assign(names(rwrdatafile)[i],rwrdatafile[,i]) } and in fact this nicely assigns each column in the data frame to a name, but I do not see the variables as data in the environment section. But what I need are variables that I can work with in matrix operations. I also tried for(i in 1:k){ names(rwrdatafile)[i] = rwrdatafile[,i,drop=FALSE] } thinking that this for loop would just repeat what I do for wage = rwrdatafile[,1,drop=FALSE] for all the variables in rwrdatafile. Please note that I do need to use a for loop and in fact I need to translate and imitate the MATLAB code below, which does the job in MATLAB, as close as possible in R. # MATLAB code generating variables from structure array rwrdatafile [N,k] = size(rwrdatafile.data); for i = 1:k eval([cell2mat(rwrdatafile.textdata(i)) '= rwrdatafile.data(:,i);']) end ______________________________________________ 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.