edit: I found out how to declare empty variables in R, but the code still does not work. I get the index out of bounds error since my data is irregular (some have more dates than others, and the matrix will not allow for different sized rows)
Dear R Gurus, Thanks for any help in advance! Date.frame: Returns.names X id ticker date_ adjClose totret RankStk 258060 258060 13645T10 CP 2001-06-29 18.125 1877.758 My data frame is in the above format. I would like to filter by period, per id (every 125 days) each consisting of 250 days, I.e. 1-250, 126-375, etc. One important thing to note is that not all ID's have the same number of dates. x<-unique(Returns.names$date_) gives me the ordered list of all the dates, so for each period i want it would be x[((n-1)*125+1):((n+1)*125)] when i tried to filter for just 1 period, it worked fine, but alas, I do not know how to work around the problem that you cannot assign dynamic variables in loops (say I named the variable for the extracted dates Returns.period, it would get overwritten every iteration of the loop, and I cant name something Returns.n, where n is the index for the loop) "Thus, I tried to adjust by dynamically assigning each period to a column. However, I get the error: object 'Returns.period1' not found. And R is not like Java where you can simply declare a variable by typing say Returns.period1. I do not know how to create a flexible empty matrix that would allow this code to work. If anyone knows how to do this without a loop, that would be even better! ##Filtering by Period n<-1 while(n<=19) { Returns.period<-lapply(((n-1)*125+1):((n+1)*125), function (i) which(Returns.filter$date_==x[i])) Returns.period<-unlist(Returns.period) Returns.period1[n,1:(length(Returns.period))]<-Returns.filter[Returns.period,] n<-n+1 }" -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Extracting-Elements-By-Date-tp2248227p2248241.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.