This must be a very simple question, but I can't find any information on it elsewhere, sorry. When extracting information from a list using column headers, how do I get R to interpret something as a variable rather than a string? For example:
xx$"YAL002" works, but this doesn't: gene <- "YAL002" xx$gene neither do xx$parse(gene) xx$eval(gene) xx$eval(parse(gene)) or a variety of other constructions I have tried. Background: I have a table of information about yeast genes, and I also have a list of yeast genes and their GO terms (xx) from the YEAST package that I downloaded. I want to go through all the genes in my table and look up their GO terms in the list from the YEAST package. They might not contain exactly the same genes (ideally they should, but I'd be surprised if they do) and I don't think they're in the same order, so I do want to use the column names, but there are a lot of them so I'm not typing them all out individually. It might be possible to turn the GO data into something other than a list, but the help page recommends using xx <- as.list(YEASTGO) and doesn't make any other suggestions, so I should probably do as I'm told. Thanks for any help or suggestions of where to look, Rosa ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.