Getting strings recognized as variable names in R

Question

Related: Strings as variable references in R
Possibly related: Concatenate expressions to subset a dataframe

---

I\'ve simplified the question per the comment

Answer 1

The basic answer to the question in the title is eval(as.symbol(variable_name_as_string)) as Josh O'Brien uses. e.g.

var.name = "x"
assign(var.name, 5)
eval(as.symbol(var.name)) # outputs 5

Or more simply:

get(var.name) # 5