cbind question, please

You could do something tricky like

  > do.call(cbind, lapply(big.char, as.name))

       dog cat tree
  [1,]   1   2    5
  [2,]   2   3    6
  [3,]   3   4    7
but you are usually better off creating these things as part of a list
and passing that to do.call(cbind, list).

There is a slight danger of using do.call with cbind.  If your
list has a component with the unlikely name 'deparse.level',
then that will be taken as cbind's deparse.level argument,
not as a column of the matrix to be made.


Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Erin Hodgess <erinm.hodgess at gmail.com>
wrote:

Hello!

I have a cbind type question, please:  Suppose I have the following:

dog <- 1:3
cat <- 2:4
tree <- 5:7

and a character vector
big.char <- c("dog","cat","tree")

I want to end up with a matrix that is a "cbind" of dog, cat, and tree.
This is a toy example.  There will be a bunch of variables.

I experimented with "do.call", but all I got was
1
2
3

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.  I still think that do.call
might be the key, but I'm not sure.

R Version 3-1.3, Windows 7.

Thanks,
Erin


--
Erin Hodgess
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematical and Statistics
University of Houston - Downtown
mailto: erinm.hodgess at gmail.com

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