Create vectors within lappy (or loop) - r

Question

I would like to loop a function over a vector of characters. The function will create a vector or a list, and the name of each vector (list) will be taken from the vector of characters. For example.
# The data would look like:
fist second third
1 2 3
1 NA 3
1 2 3
1 2 NA
NA 2 3
# I want to create three lists/vectors such as
first <- c("1.pdf", "1.pdf", "1.pdf", "1.pdf")
second <- c("2.pdf", "2.pdf", "2.pdf", "2.pdf")
third <- c("3.pdf", "3.pdf", "3.pdf", "3.pdf")
# where, first, second, third, now are the names of the vectors. I tried the following way.
vector_names <- c("first", "second", "third")
cleanNA <- function(x){
x <- as.character(as.data.frame(t(data[paste0(x)])))
x <- na.omit(x) # remove all NA observations.
x <- paste0(x, ".pdf")
return(x)
}
# I can do this by a vector length 1.
name <- c("first")
assign(name, namef)
namef <- createlists(name)
# But once I do an lapply, it won't create the three vectors as I wanted. The lapply does run and returns what I want, but not create the three vectors.
lapply(vector_names, cleanNA)
I've been searching for this type of questions many times and feel R doesn't really provide a good way to generate a new vector within a loop. Am I right? Thanks.

Answer 1

Here's a simplified version :
cleanNA <- function(data, x){
x <- data[[x]]
x <- na.omit(x)
x <- paste0(x, ".pdf")
return(x)
#Or a one-liner
#paste0(na.omit(data[[x]]), '.pdf')
}
list_vec <- lapply(vector_names, cleanNA, data = data)
list_vec
#[[1]]
#[1] "1.pdf" "1.pdf" "1.pdf" "1.pdf"
#[[2]]
#[1] "2.pdf" "2.pdf" "2.pdf" "2.pdf"
#[[3]]
#[1] "3.pdf" "3.pdf" "3.pdf" "3.pdf"
It is better to keep data in a list so that it is easier to manage and avoids creating lot of objects in global environment. However, if you want them as separate vectors you can use list2env :
list_vec <- setNames(list_vec, vector_names)
list2env(list_vec, .GlobalEnv)
data
data <- structure(list(first = c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, NA), second = c(2L,
NA, 2L, 2L, 2L), third = c(3L, 3L, 3L, NA, 3L)), class = "data.frame",
row.names = c(NA, -5L))