Parsing colnames text string as expression in R - r

Question

I am trying to create a large number of data frames in a for loop using the "assign" function in R. I want to use the colnames function to set the column names in the data frame. The code I am trying to emulate is the following:
county_tmax_min_df <- data.frame(array(NA,c(length(days),67)))
colnames(county_tmax_min_df) <- c('Date',sd_counties$NAME)
county_tmax_min_df$Date <- days
The code I have so far in the loop looks like this:
file_vars = c('file1','file2')
days <- seq(as.Date("1979-01-01"), as.Date("1979-01-02"), "days")
f = 1
for (f in 1:2){
assign(paste0('county_',file_vars[f]),data.frame(array(NA,c(length(days),67))))
}
I need to be able to set the column names similar to how I did in the above statement. How do I do this? I think it needs to be something like this, but I am unsure what goes in the text portion. The end result I need is just a bunch of data frames. Any help would be wonderful. Thank you.
expression(parse(text = ))

Answer 1

You can set the names within assign, like that:
file_vars = c('file1', 'file2')
days <- seq.Date(from = as.Date("1979-01-01"), to = as.Date("1979-01-02"), by = "days")
for (f in seq_along(file_vars)) {
assign(x = paste0('county_', file_vars[f]),
value = {
df <- data.frame(array(NA, c(length(days), 67)))
colnames(df) <- paste0("fancy_column_",
sample(LETTERS, size = ncol(df), replace = TRUE))
df
})
}
When in {} you can use colnames(df) or setNames to assign column names in any manner desired. In your first piece of code you are referring to sd_counties object that is not available but the generic idea should work for you.