For your example, Dirk's answer is perfect. If you instead had a data frame and wanted to add that sort of sequence as a column, you could also use group
from groupdata2 (disclaimer: my package) to greedily divide the datapoints into groups.
# Attach groupdata2
library(groupdata2)
# Create a random data frame
df <- data.frame("x" = rnorm(27))
# Create groups with 5 members each (except last group)
group(df, n = 5, method = "greedy")
x .groups
<dbl> <fct>
1 0.891 1
2 -1.13 1
3 -0.500 1
4 -1.12 1
5 -0.0187 1
6 0.420 2
7 -0.449 2
8 0.365 2
9 0.526 2
10 0.466 2
# … with 17 more rows
There's a whole range of methods for creating this kind of grouping factor. E.g. by number of groups, a list of group sizes, or by having groups start when the value in some column differs from the value in the previous row (e.g. if a column is c("x","x","y","z","z")
the grouping factor would be c(1,1,2,3,3)
.