How can a concatenated string be transformed into a variable name?

This is almost certainly not what you want to do, because creating different variable names on the fly usually means you should be creating a different data structure - e.g. a hash table indexed by the date rather than a unique variable name. However, if you really want to do this (the wrong way in my opinion), then taking your code:

item=""
lists=setof(i parseString(getCurrentTime() "") i!=" " && i!=":")
foreach(elem lists
    item=strcat(item elem)
)

(I assume you used some kind of optical character recognition because it had some spurious parentheses) then you could do:

set(concat("a_" item) 5)

you can retrieve it with:

symeval(concat("a_" item))

A cleaner (more efficient in terms of creating garbage that needs collecting) way of building the variable name would be to do:

cleanup=pcreCompile("[ :]")
varName=concat("a_" pcreReplace(cleanup getCurrentTime() "" 0))

However, if you creating a number of these, I'd use a hash table (using makeTable) as I mentioned before.

Regards,

Andrew

Dear Mr. Beckett,

Thank you very much for your prompt, professional and informative replies. I have tried both of your proposed methods, and both work as I expected. I will test the hash‑table approach you suggested later. I will elaborate on why I require dynamic variable names based on a small ongoing project I am developing, and seek your advice on the issues I have encountered during development.

Best regards,
Steve

Dear Mr. Beckett,

Thank you very much for your prompt, professional and informative replies. I have tried both of your proposed methods, and both work as I expected. I will test the hash‑table approach you suggested later. I will elaborate on why I require dynamic variable names based on a small ongoing project I am developing, and seek your advice on the issues I have encountered during development.

Best regards,
Steve