Re: Processing a list

[David L Lorenz <lorenz@usgs.gov>]

Walt,
  You need to pass the object to
describe, not just the name. Try this

lapply(x, function(y) describe(get(y)))

Dave

"Data Analytics Corp." <dataanalytics@earthlink.net>
Sent by: s-news-owner@lists.biostat.wustl.edu

09/22/2007 11:59 AM

To	s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
cc
Subject	[S] Processing a list

Hi,

I have 100 data frames for a project, each data frame beginning with the
word "data" followed by a word for the data itself.  I'd
like to write a 
function to loop through each data frame and apply the describe function
from the HMISC library.  I created a list using

        x <- as.list(objects(pattern = "data*"))

which returns a list with 100 elements, each of which is the data frame
name as a character.  Then I did

          lapply(x, describe)

and got garbage.  I think the issue is that x contains character strings
which a function cannot use as the name of an object.  How do I tell
S+ 
to treat each character string in the list x as a data frame name which
could then be read by describe? 

I'm using s+8.0 if that matters.

Thanks,

Walt Paczkowski
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