I would like to revisit a problem that was discussed previously (see quoted discussion below). I am trying to do the same thing, using a string to indicate a column with the same name. I am making "foo" a string taken from a list of names. It matches the row where "item" = 5, and picks the corresponding "taxon"
> foo <- list$taxon[match(5,list$item)] Let's say this returns foo as "Aulacoseira_islandica". I have another matrix "counts" with column headers corresponding to the taxon list. But, when I try to access the data in the Aulacoseira_islandica column, it instead uses the data from another column. For instance... > columndata <- counts[[foo]] ...returns the data from the wrong column. What it seems to be doing is converting the text "Aulacoseira_islandica" to a number (25, for some reason) and reading the count data from column number 25, instead of from the column labelled with Aulacoseira_islandica. If I try... > columndata <- counts$Aulacoseira_islandica ...it works fine. Any thoughts? -Euan NRRI-University of Minnesota Duluth ______________________ Jason Horn-2 Oct 20, 2006; 06:28pm [R] Using a string as a variable name Is it possible to use a string as a variable name? For example: foo<="var1" frame$foo # frame is a data frame with with a column titled "var1" This does not work, unfortunately. Am I just missing the correct syntax to make this work? - Jason ______________________________________________ Oct 20, 2006; 06:30pm Re: [R] Using a string as a variable name frame[[foo]] On 10/20/06, Jason Horn <[hidden email]> wrote: > Is it possible to use a string as a variable name? For example: > > foo<="var1" > frame$foo # frame is a data frame with with a column titled "var1" > > This does not work, unfortunately. Am I just missing the correct > syntax to make this work? > > > - Jason -- Jim Holtman Cincinnati, OH +1 513 646 9390 ______________________________________________ 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.