variable name question

"This is surely an easy question but somehow I am not being able to get it."

get() is the key -- it takes a string and returns the object with that
string as its name. Assign() goes the other way

Try this:

for (i in 1990:2009) {
    varName = paste("pci", i, collapse = "")
    assign(varName, log(get(varName))
}

That said, the standard advice is that its usually more R-ish to keep
all your data in a list, data frame or, for this case, a matrix.

Michael

Hi All,

This is surely an easy question but somehow I am not being able to get it.

I am using R 2.13.2 and have a data set where variable names like this
appear:

pci1990, pci1991, ... , pci2009.

"pci1990" has data on per capita income for 1990, "pci1991" has data on per
capita income for 1991, and so on.

I would like to create the logarithm of per capita for each of the year and
could do so in STATA with the following commands:

forvalues number = 1990/2009 {
? ?gen lpci`number' = log(pci`number')
}

What would be the corresponding set of commands in R?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Deepankar

? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

______________________________________________
R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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.

<SNIP>

Try this:

for (i in 1990:2009) {
     varName = paste("pci", i, collapse = "")
     assign(varName, log(get(varName))
}

<SNIP>

I believe that ``sep= " '' is needed here rather than collapse.

Try:
         paste("junk",42,collapse="")

You get

     [1] "junk 42"

with a space in it.  Here paste is using the default value of sep, 
namely " ",
and is not using collapse at all, since there is nothing to collapse (the
value is a scalar to start with).

Whereas

         paste("junk",42,sep="")

gives

     [1] "junk42"

which is what is wanted.

     cheers,

         Rolf Turner

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20111009/82596283/attachment.pl>