converting a character string to an object name

I am trying to automate the way i read my tables. I have an Excel sheet I'm
reading using openxlsx package. The sheet contains over 30 sheets, i would
like to save each of them as separate objects.

my workflow for now is as such:

wb <- loadWorkbook(xlsxFile = "Output/Up_Down_Regulated_Gene_Lists.xlsx")
NAMES <- gsub(pattern = " ", replacement = "_", x = names(wb))
[1] "KO1_vs._WT_up"    "KO2_vs._WT_down"  "KO3_vs._WT_up"
"KO1_vs._WT_down"  "KO2_vs._WT_up" ...
for (i in 2:length(names(wb)) ){
  tmp <- read.xlsx(wb, sheet = i)

... Here I would like to have each sheet read in and sacved as a separate
data.frame.

}

Is there a way to read for each sheet the name from names(wb) and convert
it to a name for the object?

something like this
The object  KO1_vs._WT_up will save the first sheet with the same name
The object  KO2_vs._WT_down will save the second sheet.
etc.

Any ideas?

thanks
Assa

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