How to make multiple plots with a for loop? - r

Question

I was experimenting with the waffle package in r, and was trying to use a for loop to make multiple plots at once but was not able to get my code to work. I have a dataset with values for each year of renewables,and since it is over 40 years of data, was looking for a simple way to plot these with a for loop rather than manyally year by year. What am I doing wrong?
I have it from 1:16 as an experiment to see if it would work, although in reality I would do it for all the years in my dataset.
for(i in 1:16){
renperc<-islren$Value[i]
parts <- c(`Renewable`=(renperc), `Non-Renewable`=100-renperc)
waffle(parts, rows=10, size=1, colors=c("#00CC00", "#A9A9A9"),
title="Iceland Primary Energy Supply",
xlab=islren$TIME)
}

Answer 1

If I get your question correctly you want to plot all the 16 iterations in a same panel? You can parametrise your plot window to be divided into 16 smaller plots using par(mfrow = c(4,4)) (creating a 4 by 4 matrix and plotting into each cells recursively).
## Setting the graphical parameters
par(mfrow = c(4,4))
## Running the loop normally
for(i in 1:16){
renperc<-islren$Value[i]
parts <- c(`Renewable`=(renperc), `Non-Renewable`=100-renperc)
waffle(parts, rows=10, size=1, colors=c("#00CC00", "#A9A9A9"),
title="Iceland Primary Energy Supply",
xlab=islren$TIME)
}
If you need more plots (e.g. 40) you can increase the numbers in the graphical parameters (e.g. par(mfrow = c(6,7))) but that will create really tiny plots. One solution is to do it in multiple loops (for(i in 1:16); for(i in 17:32); etc.)

Answer 2

UPDATE: The code simply wasn't plotting anything when i tried putting in anything above one value (ex. 1:16) or a letter, both in terms of separate plots or many in one plot window (which I think perhaps waffle does not support in the same way as regular plots). In the end, I managed by making it into a function, although I'm still not sure why my original method wouldn't work if this did. See the code that worked below. I also tweaked it a bit, adding ggsave for example.
#function
waffling <- function(x){
renperc<-islren$Value[x]
parts <- c(`Renewable`=(renperc), `Non-Renewable`=100-renperc)
waffle(parts, rows=10, size=1, colors=c("#00CC00", "#A9A9A9"), title="",
xlab=islren$TIME[x])
ggsave(file=paste0("plot_", x,".png"))}
for(i in 1:57){
waffling(i)
}