Extract names of objects from list

Question

I have a list of objects. How do I grab the name of just one object from the list? As in:

LIST <- list(A=1:5, B=1:10) LIST$A some.way.cool.function(LIST$A)  #function I hope exists "A"   #yay! it has returned what I want 

names(LIST) is not correct because it returns "A" and "B".

Just for context I am plotting a series of data frames that are stored in a list. As I come to each data.frame I want to include the name of the data.frame as the title. So an answer of names(LIST)[1] is not correct either.

EDIT: I added code for more context to the problem

x <- c("yes", "no", "maybe", "no", "no", "yes") y <- c("red", "blue", "green", "green", "orange") list.xy <- list(x=x, y=y)  WORD.C <- function(WORDS){ require(wordcloud)  L2 <- lapply(WORDS, function(x) as.data.frame(table(x), stringsAsFactors = FALSE))      FUN <- function(X){         windows()          wordcloud(X[, 1], X[, 2], min.freq=1)         mtext(as.character(names(X)), 3, padj=-4.5, col="red")  #what I'm trying that isn't working     }     lapply(L2, FUN) }  WORD.C(list.xy) 

If this works the names x and y will be in red at the top of both plots

Answer 1

You can just use:

> names(LIST) [1] "A" "B" 

Obviously the names of the first element is just

> names(LIST)[1] [1] "A" 

Answer 2

Making a small tweak to the inside function and using lapply on an index instead of the actual list itself gets this doing what you want

x <- c("yes", "no", "maybe", "no", "no", "yes") y <- c("red", "blue", "green", "green", "orange") list.xy <- list(x=x, y=y)  WORD.C <- function(WORDS){   require(wordcloud)    L2 <- lapply(WORDS, function(x) as.data.frame(table(x), stringsAsFactors = FALSE))    # Takes a dataframe and the text you want to display   FUN <- function(X, text){     windows()      wordcloud(X[, 1], X[, 2], min.freq=1)     mtext(text, 3, padj=-4.5, col="red")  #what I'm trying that isn't working   }    # Now creates the sequence 1,...,length(L2)   # Loops over that and then create an anonymous function   # to send in the information you want to use.   lapply(seq_along(L2), function(i){FUN(L2[[i]], names(L2)[i])})    # Since you asked about loops   # you could use i in seq_along(L2)    # instead of 1:length(L2) if you wanted to   #for(i in 1:length(L2)){   #  FUN(L2[[i]], names(L2)[i])   #} }  WORD.C(list.xy)