How to access data saved in an assign construct? - r

Question

I made a list, read the list into a for loop, do some calculations with it and export a modified dataframe to [1] "IAEA_C2_NoStdConditionResiduals1" [2] "IAEA_C2_EAstdResiduals2" ect. When I do View(IAEA_C2_NoStdConditionResiduals1) after the for loop then I get the following error message in the console: Error in print(IAEA_C2_NoStdConditionResiduals1) : object 'IAEA_C2_NoStdConditionResiduals1' not found, but I know it is there because RStudio tells me in its Environment view. So the question is: How can I access the saved data (in this assign construct) for further usage?
ResidualList = list(IAEA_C2_NoStdCondition = IAEA_C2_NoStdCondition,
IAEA_C2_EAstd = IAEA_C2_EAstd,
IAEA_C2_STstd = IAEA_C2_STstd,
IAEA_C2_Bothstd = IAEA_C2_Bothstd,
TIRI_I_NoStdCondition = TIRI_I_NoStdCondition,
TIRI_I_EAstd = TIRI_I_EAstd,
TIRI_I_STstd = TIRI_I_STstd,
TIRI_I_Bothstd = TIRI_I_Bothstd
)
C = 8
for(j in 1:C) {
#convert list Variable to string for later usage as Variable Name as unique identifier!!
SubNameString = names(ResidualList)[j]
SubNameString = paste0(SubNameString, "Residuals")
#print(SubNameString)
LoopVar = ResidualList[[j]]
LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed"] = round(LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed"] / mean(LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed"]),
digit = 5
)
LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed_error"] = round(LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed_error"] / mean(LoopVar[ ,"F_corrected_normed_error"]),
digit = 5
)
assign(paste(SubNameString, j), LoopVar)
}
View(IAEA_C2_NoStdConditionResiduals1)

Answer 1

Not really a problem with assign and more with behavior of the paste function. This will build a variable name with a space in it:
assign(paste(SubNameString, j), LoopVar)
#simple example
> assign(paste("v", 1), "test")
> `v 1`
[1] "test"
,,,, so you need to get its value by putting backticks around its name so the space is not misinterpreted as a parse-able delimiter. See what happens when you type:
`IAEA_C2_NoStdCondition 1`
... and from here forward, use paste0 to avoid this problem.