title: Avoiding backtick characters with dplyr
body: <p>How can I write the argument of <code>select</code> without backtick characters? I would like to do this so that I can pass in this argument from a variable as a character string.</p>
  
  <pre><code>df &lt;- dat[["__Table"]] %&gt;% select(`__ID` ) %&gt;% mutate(fk_table = "__Table", val = 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Changing the argument of select to <code>"__ID"</code> gives this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error: All select() inputs must resolve to integer column positions.
  The following do not:
  *  "__ID"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, the <code>_</code> characters in column names cannot be avoided since the data is downloaded from a relational database (FileMaker) via ODBC and needs to be written back to the database while preserving the column names.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally, I would like to be able to do the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>colName &lt;- "__ID"    
  df &lt;- dat[["__Table"]] %&gt;% select(colName) %&gt;% mutate(fk_table = "__Table", val = 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've also tried <code>eval(parse())</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df &lt;- dat[["__Table"]] %&gt;% select( eval(parse(text="__ID")) ) %&gt;% mutate(fk_table = "__Table", val = 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It throws this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error in parse(text = "__ID") : &lt;text&gt;:1:1: unexpected input
  1: _
      ^
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>By the way, the following does work, but then I'm back to square one (still with backtick symbol).</p>
  
  <pre><code>eval(parse(text="`__ID`")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>References about backtick characters in <code>R</code>:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16430845/removing-backticks-in-r-output">Removing backticks in R output</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36220823/what-do-backticks-do-in-r">What do backticks do in R?</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38353174/r-encoding-ascii-backtick?noredirect=1&amp;lq=1">R encoding ASCII backtick</a></li>
  </ul>