making a loop to create dummy data

November 10, 2022

I am trying to create a loop for making a series of dummy data files. Basically, I want a loop to create three dataframes: h00_2000, h10_2000, s00_2000, with the associated x values of h00_, h10_, and s00 for naming purposes. I want them to have three columns each with 5 observations, x_city, x_race, and id. x_city should have a random string, x_race should be 1 or 2, and id should be random numbers. This is where I am at, but the loop doesn’t work, and I don’t know how to assign it to the dataframe names I’ve given:

for(x in c("h00_", "h10_", "s00_")){
paste0(x, "city") <- do.call(paste0, replicate(5, sample(LETTERS, 50, TRUE), FALSE))
paste0(x, "race") <- do.call(paste0, replicate(1, sample(1:2, 50, TRUE), FALSE))
id <-  do.call(paste0, replicate(5, sample(0:9, 50, TRUE), FALSE))
}

>Solution :

You can use assign:

for(x in c("h00_", "h10_", "s00_")){
  assign(paste0(x, "2000"), data.frame(
    city = do.call(paste0, replicate(5, sample(LETTERS, 50, TRUE), FALSE)),
    race =  do.call(paste0, replicate(1, sample(1:2, 50, TRUE), FALSE)),
    id =  do.call(paste0, replicate(5, sample(0:9, 50, TRUE), FALSE))))
}

head(h00_2000)
#>    city race    id
#> 1 LCJUC    2 51629
#> 2 TEQLS    2 20029
#> 3 OWNQB    2 51191
#> 4 LZXHI    2 02100
#> 5 CYOPQ    1 26055
#> 6 JCXHT    2 50408
head(h10_2000)
#>    city race    id
#> 1 EJFHL    2 33186
#> 2 VBPID    1 10350
#> 3 PSQLN    2 21706
#> 4 GYMPY    1 68808
#> 5 CMKUS    2 64416
#> 6 ERELS    1 26259
head(s00_2000)
#>    city race    id
#> 1 WOWMI    2 95953
#> 2 JAGIW    1 32360
#> 3 NMVYS    2 83824
#> 4 TDQZO    1 44549
#> 5 QTIWO    1 39824
#> 6 WJPUU    2 29531