It's not clear what you're trying to do. However, to "assign a value to a specific position of a list", this example should show you how.
lst <- vector('list', 10) ## see the help page for list names(lst) <- paste0('list.',1:10) ## to assign 'a' to position 3: pos <- 3 lst[[pos]] <- 'a' I completely agree with Jeff Newmiller's recommendation to avoid using assign. It's probably the wrong tool for what you're trying to do (whatever that is). (and note that I have borrowed Jeff's name "lst" for the list with 10 elements [not variables] whose names are "list_1" "list_2" etc.) (and I refuse to use "_" in R object names, but that's a personal preference) -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 4/30/17, 8:17 AM, "R-help on behalf of Jinsong Zhao" <r-help-boun...@r-project.org on behalf of jsz...@yeah.net> wrote: Hi there, I have a problem with assign(). Here is the demo code: for (i in 1:10) { # create a list with variable name as list_1, list_2, ..., etc. assign(paste("list_", i, sep = ""), list()) # I hope to assign 5 to list_?[[1]], but I don't know how to code it. # list_1[[1]] <- 5 # works, however assign(paste("list_", i, "[[1]]", sep = "", 5) # does not work } How to do? Is there any alternatives? Many thanks! Best, Jinsong ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.