R help - May 2007 - naive question about using an object as the name of another object

This is a dumb question, but I'm having trouble finding the answer to this.

I'd like to do the following:

x<-"asdf"

and then have

the object x.y become automatically converted/represented as asdf.y (sort of
akin to macro variables in SAS where you would do:
%let x=asdf and do &x..y)

What is the syntax for having x represented as "asdf" in x.y ?

Thanks,
Andrew

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On 17/05/2007 10:11 PM, Andrew Yee wrote:
> This is a dumb question, but I'm having trouble finding the answer to
this.
> 
> I'd like to do the following:
> 
> x<-"asdf"
> 
> and then have
> 
> the object x.y become automatically converted/represented as asdf.y (sort
of
> akin to macro variables in SAS where you would do:
> %let x=asdf and do &x..y)
> 
> What is the syntax for having x represented as "asdf" in x.y ?
You can use assign( gsub("x", x, "x.y"), x.y ), but this is
not a normal
thing to do in R programs:  R is not SAS. You should investigate using a 
list and setting a member of it, e.g.

asdf$y <- value

or

f <- function(value) list(y=value)
asdf <- f(value)

depending on what you are trying to do.

Duncan Murdoch