Packing and unpacking items from a list in R

I have two questions related to using a list in R and I am trying to figure out how I can improve my naive solution. I've seen questions on a similar topic here, but the approach described there doesn't help.

Q1:

MWE:

a  <- c(1:5)
b  <- "adf"
c  <- array(rnorm(9), dim = c(3,3) )

      

        
        
        
      

    

• Make a list, say, named "packed list" while keeping the name of all variables.
• Current solution: packedList <- list(a = a, b = b, c = c)
  
  

However, if the number of variables (three of the problems above, i.e. a, b, c

) is large (say we have 20 variables), then my current solution may not be the best.

This idea is useful when returning a large number of variables from a function.

Q2:

MWE: given packedList

, extract variables a, b, c

• I would like to highlight all of the items in a specified list (i.e. packageList) into the environment while keeping their names. This is inverse problem 1.

For example: given variable packageList in environment, I can define a, b and c like this:

 a <- packedList$a
 b <- packedList$b
 c <- packedList$c

      

        
        
        
      

    

However, if the number of variables is very large, then my solution can be cumbersome. - After some googling I found one solution , but I'm not sure if this is the most elegant solution. The solution is shown below:

 x <- packedList
 for(i in 1:length(x)){
       tempobj <- x[[i]]
       eval(parse(text=paste(names(x)[[i]],"= tempobj")))
 }