How to rename element's list indexed by a loop in R

Question

I\'m new on R language and I still have a lot to learn. I\'ve a list W of J elements and I would like to rename its elements W[[i]] with Wi

Answer 1

names(W) <- paste0("W", seq_along(W))

should do the trick.

Note that paste0 was introduced in R 2.15 as a "slightly more efficient" version of paste(..., sep = "", collapse) . If you are using an earlier version of R, you can achieve the same using paste:

names(W) <- paste("W", seq_along(W), sep = "")

Answer 2

Alternatively you can use sprintf():

 w<-list(a="give",b="me an",c="example")
 names(w)<-sprintf("W%i",1:length(w))

As you can see, you do not need a loop for this.

It should do the work. In this example, the names are W1,W2 and W3

print(w)
$W1
[1] "give"

$W2
[1] "me an"

$W3
[1] "example"

Answer 3

A purrr solution using @Quentin's data:

library(purrr)
w <- list(a = "give", b = "me an", c = "example") %>% 
  set_names(~paste0("W", 1:length(w)))
w
# $W1
# [1] "give"

# $W2
# [1] "me an"

# $W3
# [1] "example"