r create and address variable in for loop - r

Question

I have multiple csv-files in one folder. I want to load each csv-file in this folder into one separate data frame. Next, I want to extract certain elements from this data frame into a matrix and calculate the mean of all these matrixes.
setwd("D:\\data")
group_1<-list.files()
a<-length(group_1)
mferg_mean<-data.frame
for(i in 1:a)
{
assign(paste0("mferg_",i),read.csv(group_1[i],header=FALSE,sep=";",quote="",dec=",",col.names=1:90))
}
As there are 11 csv-files in the folder I now have the data frames
mferg_1
to
mferg_11
How can I address each data frame in this loop? As mentioned, I want to extract certain elements from each data frame to a matrix. I would imagine it something like this:
assign(paste0("mferg_matrix_",i),mferg_i[1:5,1:10])
But this obviously does not work because R does not recognize mferg_i in the loop. How can I address this data frame?

Answer 1

This is not something you should probably be using assign for in the first place. Working with a bunch of different data.frames in R is a mess, but working with a list of data.frames is much easier. Try reading your data with
group_1<-list.files()
mferg <- lapply(group_1, function(filename) {
read.csv(filename,header=FALSE,sep=";",quote="",dec=",",col.names=1:90))
})
and you get each each value with mferg[[1]], mferg[[1]], etc. And then you can create a list of extractions with
mferg_matrix <- lapply(mferg, function(x) x[1:5, 1:10])
This is the more R-like way to do things.
But technically you can use get to retrieve values like you use assign to create them. For example
assign(paste0("mferg_matrix_",i),get(paste0("mferg_",i))[1:5,1:10])
but again, this is probably not a smart strategy in the long run.