Question

I want to run split() in a for loop, but when I pass it variable text, it just creates a new data.frame containing the text. The idea here is to split CMPD_DF_1, CMPD_DF_2, etc. based on CMPD_DF_1[5], CMPD_DF_2[5], etc. How do I pass in the data.frame and not a string?

for (i in 1:10) {
  split(paste("CMPD_DF", i, sep = "_"), 
        paste(paste("CMPD_DF", i, sep = "_"), "[5]", sep=""))
}

Answer 1

Your code doesn’t work because you’re not passing a data.frame to split. You’re passing a character vector that contains a string with the name of your data.frame. Something like this should work, but it’s not very R-like. @joran’s answer is preferable.

for (i in 1:10) {
  dfname <- paste("CMPD_DF", i, sep = "_")
  split(get(dfname), get(dfname)[5])
}