Dear R Helpers, I have a list that contains a number of objects, each of them financial statement data from quantmod (although I don't think that knowledge of quantmod is necessary to help with this problem).
> str(listfinobj) chr [1:4815] "A.f" "AA.f" "AACC.f" "AAME.f" "AAN.f" "AAON.f" "AAP.f" "AAPL.f" "AAT.f" "AATI.f" "AAU.f" ... I can easily pick out the 3rd object in this list. > listfinobj[[3]] [1] "AACC.f" Each of the .f objects has a mildly complicated structure (partial results shown below). > str(AACC.f) List of 3 $ IS:List of 2 ..$ Q: num [1:49, 1:5] 50.4 NA 50.4 NA 50.4 ... .. ..- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2 .. .. ..$ : chr [1:49] "Revenue" "Other Revenue, Total" "Total Revenue" "Cost of Revenue, Total" ... .. .. ..$ : chr [1:5] "2011-03-31" "2010-12-31" "2010-09-30" "2010-06-30" ... .. ..- attr(*, "col_desc")= chr [1:5] "3 months ending 2011-03-31" "3 months ending 2010-12-31" "3 months ending 2010-09-30" "3 months ending 2010-06-30" ... ..$ A: num [1:49, 1:4] 198 NA 198 NA 198 ... .. ..- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2 .. .. ..$ : chr [1:49] "Revenue" "Other Revenue, Total" "Total Revenue" "Cost of Revenue, Total" ... .. .. ..$ : chr [1:4] "2010-12-31" "2009-12-31" "2008-12-31" "2007-12-31" .. ..- attr(*, "col_desc")= chr [1:4] "12 months ending 2010-12-31" "12 months ending 2009-12-31" "12 months ending 2008-12-31" "12 months ending 2007-12-31" $ BS:List of 2 ..$ Q: num [1:42, 1:5] NA NA 6.53 326.25 NA ... .... I can get the column names for one of the sub-objects of this object. > colnames(AACC.f$IS$A) [1] "2010-12-31" "2009-12-31" "2008-12-31" "2007-12-31" Thanks for your patience so far; here's the question. I want to get the column names from all the sub objects in each of the .f objects, so I want to build a loop, but I need to be able to refer to the column names of the sub object dynamically. My many attempts with paste and get have not worked, I believe because of the quotes and the $'s. For example > temp<-colnames(paste(listfinobj[[3]],$BS$A)[1],sep=",") Error: unexpected '$' in "temp<-colnames(paste(listfinobj[[3]],$" > as.name(paste(as.name(listfinobj[[3]]),as.name("$BS$A"),sep="")) `AACC.f$BS$A` > colnames(as.name(paste(as.name(listfinobj[[3]]),as.name("$BS$A"),sep=""))) NULL > as.factor(paste(as.name(listfinobj[[3]]),as.name("$BS$A"),sep="")) [1] AACC.f$BS$A Levels: AACC.f$BS$A > colnames(as.factor(paste(as.name(listfinobj[[3]]),as.name("$BS$A"),sep=""))) NULL Please help me to understand how to refer to the column names in the sub-objects of the objects in the list dynamically so that I can build a loop to get at each of them. Your help would be much appreciated. --John J. Sparks, Ph.D. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.