Question

I have a variable (x) containing a character string (“b”). This string gives the name of a variable which is contained in a dataframe (ABC). When trying to use the function get() to retrieve the value of the variable in the dataframe, I get an “object not found” error.

a <- 1
b <- 2
c <- 3
ABC <- data.frame(a,b,c)
x <- "b"

This works:

get(x)
  [1] 2

While this gives an error:

get(paste("ABC$",x,sep=""))
  Error in get(paste("ABC$", x, sep = "")) : object 'ABC$b' not foundhere

Although this works:

ABC$b
  [1] 2

How can I use the variable x to see the value of variable b?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You are making things way too complex.

ABC[,x]

or

ABC[[x]]

should work fine.