Assign a column of a data.frame with string name in R

Question

I am trying to assign data to an existing dataframe with a name generated in a loop. A basic example might be

A = data.frame(a = c(1,2,3), b=c(3,6,2))

for          


        

Answer 1

Maybe you want this:

R> A <- data.frame(a=c(1,2,3), b=c(3,6,2))
R> colnames(A) <- paste("Names", 1:ncol(A), sep="")
R> A
  Names1 Names2
1      1      3
2      2      6
3      3      2
R> 

but as Tyler said in the comment, it is not entirely clear what you are asking.

Answer 2

Still not entirely sure what you're trying to accomplish:

A = data.frame(a = c(1,2,3), b=c(3,6,2))
B <- data.frame(A, c(6, 3, 2), c(6, 3, 2))
names(B)[3:4] <- paste0("name", 1:2)
B

Which yields:

  a b name1 name2
1 1 3     6     6
2 2 6     3     3
3 3 2     2     2

Answer 3

The other answers are good, but if you are set on using a loop like you have, then this would work:

A <- data.frame(a = c(1,2,3), b = c(3,6,2))

for (i in 1:2){
    A[paste("Name", i, sep="")] <- c(6,3,2)
}

which gives

> A
  a b Name1 Name2
1 1 3     6     6
2 2 6     3     3
3 3 2     2     2

Alternatively, paste("Name", i, sep="") could be replaced with paste0("Name", i)