Using ifelse() statements to get objects of different classes in R

I want to know how to use ifelse() statements to get different kinds of objects in R.

Specifically, I want to do this with the mtcars data, which is a list type object. I used the code below to create a character object version of the name of the data, called mtcars__string_object.

mtcars__string_object <- c("mtcars")

For the object itself, here is the code I want to use to get this data via an ifelse() statement, which does not work:

test_1 <- 
  ifelse(
    ((typeof(mtcars) == "list") == TRUE),
    (mtcars),
    NA
  )

It does not work because it doesn't give me the dataset in its original form. Here are the results:

> test_1
[[1]]
 [1] 21.0 21.0 22.8 21.4 18.7 18.1 14.3 24.4 22.8 19.2 17.8 16.4 17.3 15.2 10.4
[16] 10.4 14.7 32.4 30.4 33.9 21.5 15.5 15.2 13.3 19.2 27.3 26.0 30.4 15.8 19.7
[31] 15.0 21.4

When I just use the name of the object, here is the code I want to use to get this data via an ifelse() statement, which does not work:

test_2 <- 
  ifelse(
    ((typeof(mtcars) == "character") == TRUE),
    (get(mtcars__string_object[1])),
    NA
  )

It does not work because it doesn't give me the dataset in its original form. Here are the results:

> test_2
[1] NA

I'm not sure how to fix the code to get the desired result. Please advise. Thanks.

---

---

Here is the code that I used for the example:

# StackOverflow materials

## sets up data

### name of object
mtcars

### text object with name of dataset
mtcars__string_object <- c("mtcars")

## checks typeof() of objects
typeof(mtcars)
typeof(mtcars__string_object)

## ifelse() statements to call data

### for object itself
# ---- NOTE: creates object
test_1 <- 
  ifelse(
    ((typeof(mtcars) == "list") == TRUE),
    (mtcars),
    NA
  )
# ---- NOTE: displays object
test_1
# ---- NOTE: does not work

### for text object with name of dataset
# ---- NOTE: creates object
test_2 <- 
  ifelse(
    ((typeof(mtcars) == "character") == TRUE),
    (get(mtcars__string_object[1])),
    NA
  )
# ---- NOTE: displays object
test_2
# ---- NOTE: does not work