[R] unquoting

[Murray Jorgensen]

I would like a function to strip quotes off character strings. I should 
work like this:

 > A <- matrix(1:6, nrow = 2, ncol=3)
 > AF <- as.data.frame(A)
 > names(AF) <- c("First","Second","Third")
 > AF
   First Second Third
1     1      3     5
2     2      4     6
 > names(AF)[2]
[1] "Second"
 > attach(AF)
 > unquote(names(AF)[2])
[1] 3 4

Of course what I actually get is

Error: couldn't find function "unquote"

The reason that I want to do this is that I have a frame with a rather 
large number of variables and I would like to loop over the names and 
print out various descriptive summaries of the variable's distribution.

OK, OK, I could just go

 > AF[,2]
[1] 3 4

but once I thought of unquoting I have some sort of inner need to know 
how to do it!

Cheers,

Murray
-- 
Dr Murray Jorgensen      http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz                                Fax 7 838 4155
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