Creating multiple varibales in for loop

[groover1974]

Hi all

Believe it or not, I can't find a simple answer to this. Let's say I have a df called mydata with variables id, name, qty and there is already data in those.
I want to add columns to that existing df so it becomes id, name, qty, s1, s2, ..., s88. Trouble is - I want to create 88 of them and I don't want to do

mydata$s1 <- 0
mydata$s2 <- 0
..
mydata$s88 <- 0

For the life of me, I can't find out how to do this in a simple for loop. Showing my inexperience here I know, but I've tried:
for (i in 1:88)
{
eval(paste('s$', i, ' <- 0')
}

but this doesn't work.

It must be simple - and I have tried searching - but not turned anything up.

Cheers

[FJCC]

This can be done without a loop, as shown below where I add four columns to a data frame. I think one reason you had trouble finding a method is that it is unlikely you need to do this. What is your larger goal?

DF <- data.frame(A=1:4, B = 2:5)
NewNames <- paste0("S", 1:4)
DF[NewNames] <- 0
DF
#>   A B S1 S2 S3 S4
#> 1 1 2  0  0  0  0
#> 2 2 3  0  0  0  0
#> 3 3 4  0  0  0  0
#> 4 4 5  0  0  0  0

^{Created on 2020-09-01 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[groover1974]

thanks FJCC - that's brilliant - and does expose my inexperience. So what sort of object is NewNames in your example?

[FJCC]

NewNames is a character vector. It could be constructed like this

NewNames <- c("S1", "S2", "S3", "S4")

but that gets tedious. The paste0() function prefixes the "S" to each element of the numeric vector produced by 1:4 and returns a character vector.
I am still interested to learn why you want to make columns full of zeros.