Automate Tasks With Loops

In this lesson you will learn how to create loops to perform repeated tasks. Loops can be combined with functions to create powerful algorithms.

As the name suggests a loop is a sequence of operations that are performed over and over in some order using a loop variable.

for (variable in collection) {
  do things with variable
}

You can name the loop variable anything you like with a few restrictions:

• the name of the variable cannot start with a number

A few notes about the loop syntax:

1. The loop condition (variable in collection) is enclosed in parentheses ().
2. The body of the loop is enclosed in curly braces { }.

Data TipThe curly braces aren’t required for a single-line loop like the one that you created above. However, it is good practice to always include them.

Below you can see how a for loop works. In this case, you provide a vector of letters. Then you tell R to loop through each letter.

# Create a vector of letters called vowels
vowels <- c("a", "e", "i", "o", "u")
# loop through each element in the vector and print out the letter
for (v in vowels) {
  print(v)
}
## [1] "a"
## [1] "e"
## [1] "i"
## [1] "o"
## [1] "u"

Here’s another loop that repeatedly updates a variable called len:

len <- 0
vowels <- c("a", "e", "i", "o", "u")
for (v in vowels) {
  len <- len + 1
  print(len)
}
## [1] 1
## [1] 2
## [1] 3
## [1] 4
## [1] 5
# Number of vowels
len
## [1] 5

It’s worth tracing the execution of this little program step by step. Since there are five elements in the vector vowels, the statement inside the loop will be executed five times. The first time around, len is zero (the value assigned to it before the loop begins) and v is “a”. The statement adds 1 to the old value of len, producing 1, and updates len to refer to that new value. The next time around, v is “e” and len is 1, so len is updated to be 2. After three more updates, len is 5; since there is nothing left in the vector vowels for R to process, the loop finishes.

Note that a loop variable is just a variable that’s being used to record progress in a loop. It still exists after the loop is over, and you can re-use variables previously defined as loop variables as well:

letter <- "z"
for (letter in c("a", "b", "c")) {
  print(letter)
}
## [1] "a"
## [1] "b"
## [1] "c"

Using Loops to Manipulate Data

Above you covered the basics of how a loop works. Next, let’s use a loop to manipulate some data that you worked with in the first weeks of this course. To being, let’s load libraries that you used for the time series data during week 2.

library(lubridate)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)

Next, read in the /precipitation/805325-precip-daily-2003-2013.csv file that contains precipitation data. Fix the date so it’s a date class.

boulder_precip <- read.csv("data/week-02/precipitation/805325-precip-daily-2003-2013.csv")

# fix the date
boulder_precip <- boulder_precip %>%
  mutate(DATE = as.POSIXct(DATE, format = "%Y%m%d %H:%M"))

Loop Through Dates

You can loop through dates in your data in the same way you loop through letters or other numbers. First, you grab the min() and max() date values for your boulder_precip object.

Use the year() function from the lubridate package to grab just the 4 digit year from a date class object.

year(boulder_precip$DATE)

Use min to grab the lowest or oldest year.

min(year(boulder_precip$DATE))

min_yr <- min(year(boulder_precip$DATE))
max_yr <- max(year(boulder_precip$DATE))
max_yr
## [1] 2013
min_yr
## [1] 2003

# a for loop sequences through a series of things.
# below you sequence through the min and max years found in your data
for (i in min_yr:max_yr) {
  print(i)
}
## [1] 2003
## [1] 2004
## [1] 2005
## [1] 2006
## [1] 2007
## [1] 2008
## [1] 2009
## [1] 2010
## [1] 2011
## [1] 2012
## [1] 2013

Write Loops That Perform Multiple Tasks

Next, let’s create a for loop that does the following:

1. Filters the data by year: select rows where the year = the current year in the loop
2. Creates a unique .csv file for that year: with a unique name that contains the year

To build your for loop, first write out the pseudo code, then fill in the functions needed to execute the code. Let’s start with the pipe required to subset your data for a particular year

# the year function grabs just the year from a date class object
# ==
# define the year that you want to filter out
the_year =  2003
a_year <- boulder_precip %>%
    filter(year(DATE) == the_year)

head(a_year)
##       STATION    STATION_NAME ELEVATION LATITUDE LONGITUDE
## 1 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
## 2 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
## 3 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
## 4 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
## 5 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
## 6 COOP:050843 BOULDER 2 CO US    1650.5 40.03389 -105.2811
##                  DATE HPCP Measurement.Flag Quality.Flag
## 1 2003-01-01 01:00:00  0.0                g             
## 2 2003-02-01 01:00:00  0.0                g             
## 3 2003-02-02 19:00:00  0.2                              
## 4 2003-02-02 22:00:00  0.1                              
## 5 2003-02-03 02:00:00  0.1                              
## 6 2003-02-05 02:00:00  0.1

Next, practice writing a .csv file to your hard drive.

You can use paste0() to paste together a file name that suits your purposes.

# create a file name using paste0
paste0("data/week-06/precip-", the_year, ".csv")
## [1] "data/week-06/precip-2003.csv"

Then write.csv() to write out a .csv for that year.

# write .csv file to your data directory.
write.csv(a_year, file = paste0("data/week-06/precip-", the_year, ".csv"))

Oops. Looks like you don’t have a week-06 directory yet. You can make one using the dir.create().

# create new directory - if you already have this directory then you will
# get a warning message like the one below.
dir.create("data/week_06")

# start for loop - loop through min to max years (min:max)
for (year in min_yr:max_yr) {
  # filter data by year using pipes and filter

  # export the data to a .csv file
}