R help - Jun 2010 - Speeding up the transfer of a tcl character array to R

What is the best way to transfer a character array from tcl to R.

1. This works but its very slow if the tcl variable, r, is long:

n <- as.numeric(tclvalue(.Tcl("llength $r")))
sapply(seq(0, length = n), function(i) tclvalue(.Tcl(paste("lindex
$r", i))))

2. This also works and is fast but having to set r to itself seems
somewhat ugly:

as.character(.Tcl("set r $r"))

3. The following does not work as I want as it returns all the
elements of r as one big character string separated with spaces:

tclvalue("r")

Any alternatives?