Getting strings recognized as variable names in R

Question

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

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I\'ve simplified the question per the comment

Answer 1

Without any example data, it really is difficult to know exactly what you are wanting. For instance, I can't at all divine what your object set (or is it sets) looks like.

That said, does the following help at all?

set1 <- data.frame(x = 4:6, y = 6:4, z = c(1, 3, 5))

plot(1:10, type="n")
XX <- "set1"
with(eval(as.symbol(XX)), symbols(x, y, circles = z, add=TRUE))

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EDIT:

Now that I see your real task, here is a one-liner that'll do everything you want without requiring any for() loops:

with(dat, symbols(sq, cu, circles = num,
                  bg = c("red", "blue")[(num>5) + 1]))

The one bit of code that may feel odd is the bit specifying the background color. Try out these two lines to see how it works:

c(TRUE, FALSE) + 1
# [1] 2 1
c("red", "blue")[c(F, F, T, T) + 1]
# [1] "red"  "red"  "blue" "blue"