assign
Assign Environment Variable
Description
Assigns a value to a variable name in a specific environment or the
current environment.
Usage
assign(x, value, pos = -1, envir = as.environment(pos),
inherits = FALSE, immediate = TRUE)
Arguments
| x |
a character string giving the variable name to be assigned.
|
| value |
any object. The value to be assigned to the variable 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 found, the assignment is made in the global environment.
|
| immediate |
a logical value. This argument is ignored.
|
Value
returns value.
Side Effects
The object value is assigned to the variable named x in
the specified environment (or possibly a parent environment or the
global environment if inherits is TRUE).
If you call assign("a$b", 1), you set the variable named
a$b, rather than assigning the b component of object
a. Then you can call the get function to access such a
variable. Using this technique, you can assign variables whose names
cannot be parsed as variable names.
If the specified environment is either the base package environment
(
baseenv) or the base namespace environment
(
getNamespace("base")), the value is also assigned to the
other environment.
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)