How to use paste0 on both sides of an assignment operator within a loop across a sequence of numbers?

I have a character vector that contains the names of different cities.

names <- c("Tokyo","Bangkok")

I would like to store each city name in a separate character vector, which I could do by:

name_1 <- names[1]
name_2 <- names[2]

However, I would rather like to use a loop, which I tried by:

for (i in 1:2) {
  paste0("name_",i) <- paste0("names[",i,"]")
}

This gives me an error message:

Error in paste0("name_", i) <- paste0("names[", i, "]") : 
  target of assignment expands to non-language object

How can I solve this problem? In my real data, I have hundreds of city names, which is why I want to use a loop or any other technique that saves me from writing a new line of code for every city name.

paste0 is a red herring here; it's not needed on the RHS. The function assign allows assignment to a variable as a character string:

for (i in 1:2) {
  assign(paste0("name_", i), names[i])
}

This is not in general recommended. In this particular case, one can refer to the same value simply by names[i] as opposed to names_i, but your use-case may be different.

Apart from a loop, you can also convert the vecter to a named list and then list2env().

names <- c("Tokyo", "Bangkok")

list2env(setNames(as.list(names), paste0("name_", seq_along(names))), .GlobalEnv)

name_1
# [1] "Tokyo"

name_2
# [1] "Bangkok"