assign
Assign Object to Environment
Description
Assigns a value to a name. The location of the assignment can be a specific
environment (which is useful when writing functions) or the current
environment.
Usage
assign(x, value, pos = -1, envir = as.environment(pos),
inherits = FALSE)
Arguments
| x |
a character string giving the name of the object to be assigned.
|
| value |
any object. The value to be assigned the name in x.
|
| pos |
an integer, a character string, or an environment to specify in which
environment to assign the object. If you specify a string, it is used to find a package on the search list, and the assignment uses the environment for that package. The default assigns to the current environment. See as.environment for more details.
|
| envir |
the environment to assign to.
|
| inherits |
a logical value. If FALSE (the default), the assignment is made
in the specified environment. If TRUE, first the environment
specified by pos and/or envir is searched, and then its
parent environments are searched until the name specified by x
is found, and the assignment is made in that environment. If the name
is not not found, the assignment is made in the global environment.
|
Value
returns value.
Side Effects
The x argument provides the name of the object value
that is created.
If you call assign("a\$b", 1), you create an object named a\$b. Then you can call the get function to access such an object. Using this technique, you can create objects (to correspond with objects in another language, perhaps) whose names are not legal object names.
Note that the above example does not assign the b component of object a. If you want to assign the b component of the object a, create a new object with component b and then assign the entire object to a.
See Also
Examples
assign("abc", 1:3) # assign "abc"
# make up variable names in a loop
for(i in 1:10) assign(paste("sample", i, sep="."), runif(10))
# assign to a specific environment
e <- new.env()
assign('x', 42, envir=e)