Return a data frame from function

Question

I have the following code inside a function

Myfunc<- function(directory, MyFiles, id = 1:332) {
# uncomment the 3 lines below for testing
#directory<-\         


        

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you are trying to create a dataframe with the number of complete cases for each id. Supposing your files are names with the id-numbers like you specified (e.g. f2.csv), you can simplify your function as follows:

myfunc <- function(directory, id = 1:332) {
  y <- vector()
  for(i in 1:length(id)){
    x <- id
    y <- c(y, sum(complete.cases(
      read.csv(as.character(paste0(directory,"/","f",id[i],".csv"))))))
  }
  df <- data.frame(x, y)
  colnames(df) <- c("id","ret2")
  return(df)
}

You can call this function like this:

myfunc("name-of-your-directory",25:87)

---

An explanation of the above code. You have to break down your problem into steps:

1. You need a vector of the id's, that's done by x <- id
2. For each id you want the number of complete cases. In order to get that, you have to read the file first. That's done by read.csv(as.character(paste0(directory,"/","f",id[i],".csv"))). To get the number of complete cases for that file, you have to wrap the read.csv code inside sum and complete.cases.
3. Now you want to add that number to a vector. Therefore you need an empty vector (y <- vector()) to which you can add the number of complete cases from step 2. That's done by wrapping the code from step 2 inside y <- c(y, "code step 2"). With this you add the number of complete cases for each id to the vector y.
4. The final step is to combine these two vectors into a dataframe with df <- data.frame(x, y) and assign some meaningfull colnames.

By including the steps 1, 2 and 3 (except the y <- vector() part) in a for-loop, you can iterate over the list of specified id's. Creating the empty vector with y <- vector() has to be done before the for-loop, so that the for-loop can add values to y.