This seems odd. When I try to look up a list element which has a space in the name using just the first word (i.e. no spaces), it will sometimes return the element with a space in the name and sometimes it will return NULL.
Try this: alist <- list( 'hello'=10, bye=20, 'hello world'=30, 'goodbye world'=40, 'hi world'=50, 'goodbye foo'=60, 'goodbye bar'=70) Then try fetching some list elements: > alist[['goodbye']] NULL > alist[['hi']] [1] 50 > alist[['hello']] [1] 10 With "goodbye" there were a couple list elements with spaces in the name, so it didn't return any of them. With "hi" there was one (and only one) element which had "hi" as the first word: "hi world" With "hello" there was an actual element named "hello" This seems messed up and non-intuitive to say the least. I am doing this on R version 2.5.0 (2007-04-23) compiled on a itanium64 and I also tried it on R version 2.5.1 (2007-06-27) on an pentium 4 ubuntu linux [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.