Storing multiple data frames into one data structure - R

Question

Is it possible to have multiple data frames to be stored into one data structure and process it later by each data frame? i.e. example

df1 <- data.frame(c         


        

Answer 1

What you are looking for is a list. You can use a function like lapply to treat each of your data frames in the same manner sperately. However, there might be cases where you need to pass your list of data frames to a function that handles the data frames in relation to each other. In this case lapply doesn't help you.

That's why it is important to note how you can access and iterate the data frames in your list. It's done like this:

mylist[[data frame]][row,column]

Note the double brackets around your data frame index. So for your example it would be

df1 <- data.frame(c(1,2,3), c(4,5,6))
df2 <- data.frame(c(11,22,33), c(44,55,66))
mylist<-list(df1,df2)

mylist[[1]][1,2] would return 4, whereas mylist[1][1,2] would return NULL. It took a while for me to find this, so I thought it might be helpful to post here.