looping+enviroments in R: assigning new variable name to column value

Question

I am attempting to create an environment to store information for each row of a CSV file. I need some help in making a loop assigning the variable name in the new environment to be the same as the value of a specific column. I don't care as much about what its value is as much as what it is called (I'll modify the value later). How would I go about doing this?

ex., lets say that in csvFile$Names, the value is 'Blargh'. I want to make a loop that would create a variable dataEnv$Blargh which holds ANYTHING as its value.

What I have so far which is definitely wrong:

dataEnv <-  new.env()
for (value in csvFile$Names) {
  dataEnv$Names <-  c(Names)
}

Answer 1

If I understand correctly you have a vector of character strings, Names , and want to create an environment e containing objects corresponding to each element of Names having that element as its name and containing an arbitrary value. Using NULL as that value we have:

Names <- c("Blarg", "foo")
e <- new.env()
for(nm in Names) e[[nm]] <- NULL

or in one line:

e <- list2env(Map(function(x) NULL, Names))

or using the components of Names for both the names and the values:

e <- list2env(as.list(setNames(Names, Names)))