I was recently asked how to set dynamically the name of a variable in R. I knew how to do this kind of manipulation in PHP (basically, it involves calling the value of another variable as the variable name by a double buck, like $name=’ThisIsTheNameIWant’;$$name=5;), but never saw that in R.
I eventually found the solution at Rosetta Code: the assign function can do this. The syntax is simply:
assign(variableName, variableValue)
If you choose to let the user input the variable name, it may be a good idea to sanitize the name, using the make.names function. Full code:
variableName = readline("Please enter the variable name: ");
variableName = make.names(variableName);
variableValue = readline("Please enter the variable value: ");
assign(variableName, variableValue);
Then, if you want to read the variable, you’ll need to use the get function. Syntax: get(variableName).
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