I've looked in the online documentation for this, but have been unable to find an answer. I can name variables dynamically, but I cannot call them dynamically. Either a direct answer or a reference to an online resource that has the answer would be great. I'm trying to write a script that imports and compares results from various IR (information retrieval systems). Each imported file will contain results for multiple (50+) queries, each query can have 2000+ results. My immediate task is to import the files and assign the scores for each query to its own variable (e.g. File1-Query1, File1-Query2, etc) I've written code that reads in the data files and enters them as variables: res.paths <-file.path(choose.files("c:/res/*.*")) num.files<- NROW(res.paths) for (j in 1: num.files) { assign(paste("res",j, sep=""), read.table(res.paths[j])) This gives me variables named res1, res2, etc, one for each file. So far so good. But the next line of code is designed to find out how many unique values are in the first column (i.e. number of queries) of the file I just imported: assign(paste("res.count",j, sep="_"), NROW(unique(res[j]$V1))) } What I expected is a variable named e.g. res.count_1. However, I get an error: Error in unique(res[j]$V1) : object "res" not found How can I dynamically call res1, res2, etc? I've also tried using quotes and paste, but with no success. Any help is appreciated. Andrew Noyes SCILS Rutgers University