#if you want to just extract the columns of dat1 using vector1, you can just use: ?dat1[,vector1] A.K. On Tuesday, March 18, 2014 1:13 PM, arun <smartpink111 at yahoo.com> wrote: Hi, Not sure about your expected output.? May be this helps: vector1 <- c("LA_A", "LA_B", "G_A") dat1 <- setNames(as.data.frame(matrix(1:20,ncol=4)),c(vector1,"G_Z")) lapply(vector1, function(i) with(dat1,get(i))) #or for(i in vector1){ ?print(with(dat1,get(i)))} A.K. Hello, I just started learning R, and have the following problem. Would like to get the specific columns one by one, but do not know how to pass variables in R A piece of code below (does not work :) ) vector <- c("LA_A", "LA_B", "G_A",??? "G_B",??? "CK_A",??? "CK_B",??? "LDH_A",??? "LDH_B",??? "AST_A",??? "AST_B",??? "CRP_A",??? "CRP_B", ? ? ? ? ? ?"ALT_A",??? "ALT_B",??? "CT_A",??? "CT_B",??? "BUN_A",??? "BUN_B",??? "C_A",??? "C_B",??? "T_A",??? "T_B") for ( i in vector ) { ? i <- as.name(i) ? dataframe$i }