SPSS create variable function in R

Question

I am trying to switch from SPSS to R, but I'm still stuck on some aspects of the R logic at the moment. Right now, I am trying to rebuild something like the "create new variable" function from SPSS - exactly the follwing SPSS syntax:

COMPUTE ABC_WC  =   1-  ((ABS   (   WC_B    -   WC_A    ))  / ( WC_B +  WC_A + 0.0001))

In R, my data frame contains all of the defined variables (WC_A and WC_B) as columns with X observations in the line. I need to repeat these analyses for a fixed, repeating number of variables every time I do my analyses - so a more or less automated version of this calculation across all 80 variables would be great.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

If you have a data frame called df then the following should do the job in R:

df$ABC_WC <- 1 - ((abs(df$WC_B - df$WC_A)) / (df$WC_B + df$WC_A + 0.0001))

To write a function, try substituting the columns and a data frame by variables. Then write a for loop or use apply.