Snippet to split dataframe into multiple dataframes using a sorting value

dataframe_split_sort.R

# Split multi-year dataframe into smaller dataframes by year.
# This will label the new dataframes as "year1997", "year1998", etc.

# Replace DATAFRAME below with the name of your dataframe object

invisible(lapply(split(DATAFRAME, DATAFRAME$year), function(x) { 
  assign(paste0("year", x$year[1]), x, pos=.GlobalEnv) }))

# You can change the sort value to country or whatever other variable
# you like by changing all instances of "year" to whatever the other 
# variable is, e.g. "country" or "wbnum", etc. Note that this will 
# create a number of dataframes equal to whatever the number of levels 
# for the chosen sorting variable.