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Assign n Email Addresses to x Cells, Intrinsically

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Assign n Email Addresses to x Cells, Intrinsically

Sample Use Case:
Marketing requests that an email address list be divided randomly into a given number of cells so that each cell would receive a different version of copy.
Below is a technique that takes n email addresses and pseudo-randomly assigns each to one of x cells. The advantage of this method is that the user does not need to maintain a log of each email address's assigned cell since the cell assignment can be reproduced at any time.
First, read in a list of email addresses to be assigned.
emails <- c("vladputin@gmail.ru", "j.wilshere@gmail.com", "princess27@hotmail.com", 
    "dnnyby@yahoo.com", "doctoroctagon@met.com", "tommy2@aol.com", "mikef@preds.com", 
    "vandyfan@vanderbilt.org", "omaha@peyton.com", "cash.johnny@bmi.com", "tbright@caterpillar.com", 
    "soccermom@aol.com", "1736384647.6365227@compuserve.net", "ninfan@aol.com")
length(emails)

## [1] 14
Next, assign the number of cells.
cells <- 3
Create a vector of the number of characters in each email address.
em.len <- nchar(emails)
Use the modulo function (%%) to create a vector of remainders. 1 is added to the number of cells as a holdout.
em.mod <- em.len%%(cells + 1)
The table function summarizes how many email addresses have been assigned to each cell (including the holdout).
table(em.mod)

## em.mod
## 0 1 2 3 
## 3 3 4 4
Separate the original list of email addresses into the assigned cells.
em.1 <- emails[em.mod == 1]  #  cell 1
em.2 <- emails[em.mod == 2]  #  cell 2
em.3 <- emails[em.mod == 3]  #  cell 3
em.0 <- emails[em.mod == 0]  #  control
Display the email addresses assigned to each cell.
em.1

## [1] "doctoroctagon@met.com"             "soccermom@aol.com"                
## [3] "1736384647.6365227@compuserve.net"

em.2

## [1] "vladputin@gmail.ru"     "princess27@hotmail.com"
## [3] "tommy2@aol.com"         "ninfan@aol.com"

em.3

## [1] "mikef@preds.com"         "vandyfan@vanderbilt.org"
## [3] "cash.johnny@bmi.com"     "tbright@caterpillar.com"

em.0

## [1] "j.wilshere@gmail.com" "dnnyby@yahoo.com"     "omaha@peyton.com"
Now each email address has been assigned to a specific number of given cells.
Each email address will always belong to the current cell because the number of characters it has will not change.

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