Site icon R-bloggers

Converting a String to a Variable Name On-The-Fly and Vice-versa in R

ramhiser

[This article was first published on johnramey » r, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Recently, I had a professor ask me how to take a string and convert it to an R variable name on-the-fly. One possible way is: 

x <- 42
eval(parse(text = "x"))
[1] 42

Now, suppose we want to go the other way. The trick is just as simple: 

x <- 42
deparse(substitute(x))
[1] "x"

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: johnramey » r.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.