R friendly way to convert lots of R data frame columns to lots of vectors

Question

I looked at this solution: R-friendly way to convert R data.frame column to a vector?

but each solution seems to involve manually declaring the name of the vector being created.

I have a large dataframe with about 224 column names. I would like to break up the data frame and turn it into 224 different vectors which preserve their label without typing them all manually. Is there a way to step through the columns in the data frame and produce a vector which has the same name as the column or am I dreaming?

Answer 1

I think it's a bad idea but this would work (using mtcars data set):

list2env(mtcars, .GlobalEnv)

Answer 2

attach is another dangerous command that people use to be able to access the columns of a data frame directly with their names. If you don't know why it's dangerous, though, don't do it.