R loop to create data frames with 2 counters - r

Question

What I want is to create 60 data frames with 500 rows in each. I tried the below code and, while I get no errors, I am not getting the data frames. However, when I do a View on the as.data.frame, I get the view, but no data frame in my environment. I've been trying for three days with various versions of this code:
getDS <- function(x){
for(i in 1:3){
for(j in 1:30000){
ID_i <- data.table(x$ID[j: (j+500)])
}
}
as.data.frame(ID_i)
}
getDS(DATASETNAME)

Answer 1

We can use outer (on a small example)
out1 <- c(outer(1:3, 1:3, Vectorize(function(i, j) list(x$ID[j:(j + 5)]))))
lapply(out1, as.data.table)
--
The issue in the OP's function is that inside the loop, the ID_i gets updated each time i.e. it is not stored. Inorder to do that we can initialize a list and then store it
getDS <- function(x) {
ID_i <- vector('list', 3)
for(i in 1:3) {
for(j in 1:3) {
ID_i[[i]][[j]] <- data.table(x$ID[j:(j + 5)])
}
}
ID_i
}
do.call(c, getDS(x))
data
x <- data.table(ID = 1:50)

Answer 2

I'm not sure the description matches the code, so I'm a little unsure what the desired result is. That said, it is usually not helpful to split a data.table because the built-in by-processing makes it unnecessary. If for some reason you do want to split into a list of data.tables you might consider something along the lines of
getDS <- function(x, n=5, size = nrow(x)/n, column = "ID", reps = 3) {
x <- x[1:(n*size), ..column]
index <- rep(1:n, each = size)
replicate(reps, split(x, index),
simplify = FALSE)
}
getDS(data.table(ID = 1:20), n = 5)