Problem with character string input for lm () in a loop

I have a for loop where I use a different independent and dependent variable every time to run a linear regression. However, the lm() function is not working because I believe I am trying to input a character string as the variable. I created this easy example, to show what the problem is. Let's assume var1, var2, and var3 are column names in the dat dataframe. I cannot input the column names directly, so I have to assign them as character strings to an R variable.

dat <- read.csv("dat.csv")    x1 <- "var1"  x2 <- "var2"  y <- "var3"    lm(y ~ x1 + x2, data = dat) #error    

I know the issue here is that R tries to run lm("var3" ~ "var1" + "var2", data = dat). I need your help finding what function I should run on y, x1, and x2, so the lm() runs properly.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66020208/problem-with-character-string-input-for-lm-in-a-loop February 03, 2021 at 09:57AM