Chapter 10. Loops, the Un-R Way to Iterate
When starting to use R
, most people use loops whenever they need to iterate over elements of a vector
, list
or data.frame
. While it is natural to do this in other languages, with R
we generally want to use vectorization. That said, sometimes loops are unavoidable, so R
offers both for
and while
loops.
10.1. for Loops
The most commonly used loop is the for
loop. It iterates over an index—provided as a vector
—and performs some operations. For a first simple example, we print out the first ten numbers.
The loop is declared using for
, which takes one English-seeming argument in three parts. The third part is any vector
of values of any kind, most commonly numeric
or character
. The first part is the variable ...
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