Question

Is it possible to save documents within a for-loop such that the i’th run will save a document called i.txt? I tried the obvious:

for (i in 1:10) {
...
write.table(temp,file="i.txt",sep="\t", col.names=NA)
}

but this just saves one file called i.txt. Any way to do this easily? Thanks.

Answer 1

When you write file="i.txt" you are creating a fixed character string, i.e. "i.txt".

You need to add some code that takes the current value of i and uses it in the string. One option is to use paste:

paste(i, ".txt", sep="")

Or use the new (in R 2.15.0) shortcut function paste0 which uses sep="" by default

Therefore, try:

for (i in 1:10) {
...
write.table(temp,file=paste0(i, ".txt"),sep="\t", col.names=NA)
}