[R] data.frame to list

[Larry Howe]

Hi,

I'm new to R, and I'm not a statistician (stunned silence). I am trying to do 
the following:

1. read in a 2-column data file, e.g.

status	new
db	green
title	"Most Significant Excursions"

2. end up with an R list such that I can write e.g.

lst$title

and have R return "Most Significant Excursions".

I know I could do this by coding

lst = list(title="Most Significant Excursions")

however I would like to populate the list at runtime from a data file. I have 
tried

df = read.delim("params.txt", as.is=T)

and that gives me a data frame with the data in it. It seems to be a 2-element 
list where the first element is the first column of data and the second 
element is the second column of data. Not what I want.

Maybe this is a related question: what's the relation between names, dimnames, 
row.name, and rownames? Is there any way to select records out of a data 
frame or vector based on any of these attributes?

Thanks,
Larry Howe