appending to a list with dynamic names

Question

I have a list in R:

a <- list(n1 = "hi", n2 = "hello") 

I would like to append to this named list but the names must be dynamic. That is, they are created from a string (for example: paste("another","name",sep="_")

I tried doing this, which does not work:

c(a, parse(text="paste(\"another\",\"name\",sep=\"_\")=\"hola\"") 

What is the correct way to do this? The end goal is just to append to this list and choose my names dynamically.

Answer 1

You could just use indexing with double brackets. Either of the following methods should work.

a <- list(n1 = "hi", n2 = "hello") val <- "another name" a[[val]] <- "hola" a #$n1 #[1] "hi" # #$n2 #[1] "hello" # #$`another name` #[1] "hola"   a[[paste("blah", "ok", sep = "_")]] <- "hey"  a #$n1 #[1] "hi" # #$n2 #[1] "hello" # #$`another name` #[1] "hola" # #$blah_ok #[1] "hey"