Export separate texts files from list in R

Question

I have a large list of 4951 named elements. Each of these elements are basically letters (that is, they are string characters). What I would like to do is to export each of the elements of the list as a separate text file, with the name of the file corresponding to its name on the list.

A simple version of what I have is this:

 letter1 <- c("here is some text")
 letter2 <- c("and here is some more text")
 letter3 <- c("and this is the final one")

 list <- list(letter1 = letter1, letter2 = letter2, letter3 = letter3)

And I would like to have the following:

letter1.txt, the contents of which are "here is some text"
letter2.txt, the contents of which are "and here is some more text"
letter3.txt, the contents of which are "and this is the final one"

I imagine that I should use a loop. However, I don't know how to get beyond this:

for (i in 1:length(list)){

}

Pierre L · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-12T13:10:36.697

6

for (i in 1:length(list)) { write.csv(list[i], file=paste0(names(list)[i], ".txt")) }

Edit

If you need the output directory in the function:

 write.csv(list[i], file=paste0("output/", names(list)[i], ".txt"))

edited May 12 '15 at 13:10

answered May 12 '15 at 12:44

Pierre L

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Great. Sorry, but I forgot to add that a need it in an `output/` subdirectory. – JoeF May 12 '15 at 12:47
just paste the output/ directory at the beginning of the output filename – Hans Roelofsen May 12 '15 at 12:54
or `setwd()` before all of it. – Pierre L May 12 '15 at 12:58
Thanks. I thought that's what I had to do, but I got the syntax wrong. – JoeF May 12 '15 at 13:24
I also edited the paste function to `paste0`. Puts it all together without spaces. – Pierre L May 12 '15 at 13:25

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 12 '15 at 12:45

3

Try this:

filenames <- names(list)
for (i in 1:length(list)){
  outname <- paste("c:/testFolder/", filenames[i], ".txt", sep= "")
  write.table(list[[i]], outname, col.names= F, row.names= F, quote= F)
}

answered May 12 '15 at 12:45

Hans Roelofsen

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Export separate texts files from list in R

2 Answers2

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