Question

I would like to use the characters in a vector as the names of character objects
aiming to get

first as say "d","e","a","t" etc.

tried this approach but am clearly missing some function to apply to x[i]

x <- c("first","second","third"..)

for (i in 1:length(x)) {
x[i] <- sample(letters,4)
}

TIA

Answer 1

The function you are looking for is assign():

> x <- c("first","second","third")
> for (i in 1:length(x)) {
+ assign(x[i], sample(letters,4))
+ }
> 
> ls()
[1] "first"  "i"      "second" "third"  "x"     
> first
[1] "t" "d" "u" "j"
> second
[1] "o" "i" "p" "l"
> third
[1] "w" "v" "r" "n"

As an alternative, you could build these vectors as different elements of a list:

> mylist <- list()
> for (i in 1:length(x)) {
+ mylist[[x[i]]] <- sample(letters,4)
+ }
> mylist
$first
[1] "e" "l" "y" "d"

$second
[1] "t" "o" "k" "h"

$third
[1] "g" "x" "p" "b"