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, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html