[R] Indexing, and using an empty string as a name

[Charilaos Skiadas]

Hello all,

I ran into the following, to me unexpected, behavior. I have (for  
reasons that don't necessarily pertain to the question at hand, hence  
I won't go into them) the need/desire to use an empty string for the  
name of a vector entry. Perhaps I did not read ?"[" very carefully,  
but it seems to me that he following lines should return "1" at the end:

x<-1:4
names(x) <- c("","a","b","c")
x[""]


Instead, they return NA. Could anyone provide an explanation for this  
behavior?

Thanks,
Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College