title: using lapply to expand lists
body: <p>I am trying to expand out some input data that comes in character format. In the below example --</p>
  
  <pre><code>jv17 &lt;- list(4.2017,5.2017,6.2017,7.2017,8.2017,9.2017,10.2017)
  jv18 &lt;- list(4.2018,5.2018,6.2018,7.2018,8.2018,9.2018,10.2018)
  mylist1 &lt;- list("jv17")
  mylist2 &lt;- list("jv17", "jv18")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This does what I want:</p>
  
  <pre><code>eval(parse(text = mylist1))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This does not:</p>
  
  <pre><code>eval(parse(text = mylist2))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output I am looking for:</p>
  
  <pre><code>list(jv17,jv18)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I feel very confident this could be done with lapply but I'm not as good as I should be with it. Here is my best guess but I get an error that is not intuitive (at least to me).</p>
  
  <pre><code>lapply(x = mylist2, FUN = eval(parse(text = .)))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.</p>