[R] help with paste

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 01:16, Andrew Criswell wrote:
> Hello All:
> 
> Suppose the following little data frame:
> 
>  > x <- data.frame(dog = c(3,4,6,2,8), cat = c(8,2,3,6,1))
>  >
>  > x$cat
> [1] 8 2 3 6 1
>  >
> 
> How can I get the paste() function to do the same thing. The command 
> below is obviously wrong
> 
>  > paste(x, cat, sep = "$")


You need to quote the "x" and the "cat" as explicit names, otherwise the
objects 'x' and 'cat' are passed as arguments. 'x' in this case being
your data frame and 'cat' being the function cat().

Try this:

> eval(parse(text = paste("x", "cat", sep = "$")))
[1] 8 2 3 6 1

HTH,

Marc Schwartz