Loop Through Vector in R (Example) | Run while- & for-Loops Over Vectors

This tutorial shows how to loop over the elements of a vector object in R programming.

The post looks as follows:

Let’s get started.

Example Data

First, we’ll have to create some data that we can use in the examples below:

vec <- c(6, 3, 9, 0, 6, 5)        # Create example vector
vec                               # Print example vector
# 6 3 9 0 6 5

Have a look at the previously shown output of the RStudio console. It shows that our exemplifying vector consists of six numeric vector elements.

Example: Looping Over Vector Elements Using for-Loop

This Example illustrates how to write and run a for-loop over vector elements in R. Within the body of the loop, we are creating some output and we are printing this output to the RStudio console:

for(i in 1:length(vec)) {         # Head of for-loop
  out <- vec[i] + 10              # Create some output
  print(out)                      # Print output to console
}
# [1] 16
# [1] 13
# [1] 19
# [1] 10
# [1] 16
# [1] 15

Note that we could apply a similar R syntax to while-loops or repeat-loops as well.

Video & Further Resources

If you need more info on the topics of this post, you may have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I’m explaining the R programming code of this article in a programming session.

The YouTube video will be added soon.

In addition, you might want to read the other tutorials of this website. I have released several other articles already.

• for-Loop in R
• Loops in R
• Store Results of Loop in Vector
• Append to Vector in Loop
• Loop with Character Vector
• The R Programming Language

In this article you learned how to use a for-loop to loop through vectors or arrays in R. Please let me know in the comments section, in case you have further questions.