converting a character string to a R object
Please do use a meaningful subject line.
You are looking for get(): get("a") returns the R object named "a" (if one
is in scope).
Note that if you use R-devel (the development version of R, see the FAQ)
you _can_ use underscore in object names.
On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Sixten Borg wrote:
I have trouble converting a character string to a R object. Let me describe this by an example;
dim(a)
[1] 270 14
dim("a")
NULL
names(a)
[1] "Var1" "Var2" "Var3" "Var4" "Var5" "Var6" "Var7" "Var8" "Var9" [10] "Var10" "Var11" "Var12" "Var13" "Var14"
names("a")
NULL I realise that the character string lacks both a dimension and any column names; my question is how to make R understand that I look for the object a when I write "a". Like a type cast in C; (R data.frame) "a" for those familiar with C.
Rather, more like following a pointer in C. A cast would be
as.data.frame("a") or as("a", "data.frame"), which is not what you want.
The underlying reason for this is that I am writing a script that imports several datasets. The file names of the datasets contain the '_' character which forces me to construct a valid dataset name for each file. Although I can do this by hand, I would like to know if there is any solution to my first approach.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595