Victor A. Barger

Associate Professor of Marketing

You know how R prints the elements of a vector horizontally?

> 1:5
[1] 1 2 3 4 5

Today I needed the elements printed one per line. After a bit of searching and hair-pulling, I stumbled upon the cat command:

> cat(1:5,sep="\n")
1
2
3
4
5

This is particularly useful when you need a line-by-line list of the variables in a data frame, which you can get with:

cat(names(dataframe),sep="\n")

To output the list directly to a file, use write instead of cat.

Matti Heino on January 7, 2015 at 5:28 am said:

THANK YOU! I just spent over an hour trying to figure out how to solve a problem in Excel and was beginning to conclude that I need to learn macros/Visual Basic.

You saved me a lifetime of toil :D

Best regards from Finland,

Matti

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Matt on February 23, 2016 at 11:30 am said:

Thanks!

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Kevin on April 24, 2016 at 9:27 am said:

Many thanks. That was exactly I was looking for ;)

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zipfslaw1 on November 13, 2016 at 11:56 pm said:

Thanks–just what I needed today!

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Subramanya Narasandra on December 10, 2017 at 1:17 am said:

Thanks for this. Exactly what I needed; to get the names of the dataframe, printed one line at a time

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Rob Wiederstein on September 30, 2022 at 7:13 am said:

So perfect and so simple.

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