Hello to R people This is not a question. Just found a beautiful summary dated back in 2004. Hope this will be useful for your work Thanks to Gudrun Jonasdottir <gudrunj_at_math.su.se <mailto:gudrunj_at_math.su.se?Subject=Re:%20[R]%20convert%20strings%20to%20object%20names:%20SUMMARY>> In summary: The quickest way to convert a string to an object name, seems to be by using get(dat), but it seems to work equally well if you use any of eval(parse(text=dat)) do.call("print", list(as.name(dat))) eval(substitute(print(x), list(x=as.name(dat)))) assign("dat", get(paste("dat", no, sep=""))) And actually my modest addition: what if you want to save a file using a string as an object name. Here strname is some string save(list=strname, file=paste(strname,".Rdata",sep="") Don't forget to put that list= in front of strname Denis [[alternative HTML version deleted]]