Question

I have to call the table() function on 10 variables in R. Is there any way of doing it in one shot, without calling them individually like table(v1), table(v2)… table(v10)?

Answer 1

If your variables are arranged as columns in a data.frame, you could use lapply:

df <- data.frame(aa = rpois(10, 4), bb = rpois(10, 3), c = rpois(10, 7))

tabList <- lapply(df, table)

Then you get a list with the various tables:

> tabList
$aa

1 3 4 5 6 7 
2 3 2 1 1 1 

$bb

1 2 3 4 5 
1 2 4 1 2 

$c

 3  4  5  6  7  9 11 12 
 1  1  1  3  1  1  1  1 

EDIT:

For variables across multiple data.frames, you might try putting them into a list and then using lapply again:

df2 <- df[sample(rownames(df), 15, replace = TRUE), ]

df3 <- df[sample(rownames(df), 20, replace = TRUE), ]

dfList <- list(df = df, df2 = df2, df3 = df3)

lapply(dfList, function(x) lapply(x, FUN = table))