How to run a loop on the elements in workspace?

Question

> ls()
 [1] \"A\"          \"anorex.1\"   \"anorexia\"   \"B\"          \"byMonth\"    \"C\"          \"clotting\"  
 [8] \"counts\"     \"d\"          \"D\"                  


        

Answer 1

You can use get() for this. Like:

for (i in ls()) {
  print(get(i))
}

Answer 2

Your loop only uses a character name, so R thinks it's just a character vector. You need to get the object itself. You can use mget() to get multiple objects in a given environment, in a list, from a character vector. That means we can pass it ls(). Then we can run through that list and get the class.

lapply(mget(ls()), class)

I use lapply() because it is entirely possible that some objects have more than one class.

If you want to know other attributes/information about the object, write a function.

f <- function(x) list(dim = dim(x), class = class(x))
lapply(mget(ls()), f)