How do I manipulate/access elements of an instance of “dist” class using core R?

Question

A basic/common class in R is called \"dist\", and is a relatively efficient representation of a symmetric distance matrix. Unlike a \"matrix\" object,

Answer 1

Here's my practical solution for getting values from of a dist object by name. Want to get item 9 as a vector of values?

as.matrix(mat1)[grepl("9", labels(mat1))]