Dynamic column names in data.table

From data.table 1.9.4, you can just do this:

## A parenthesized symbol, `(cn)`, gets evaluated to "blah" before `:=` is carried out
test_dtb[, (cn) := mean(a), by = id]
head(test_dtb, 4)
#     a  b id blah
# 1: 41 19  1 54.2
# 2:  4 99  2 50.0
# 3: 49 85  3 46.7
# 4: 61  4  4 57.1

See Details in ?:=:

DT[i, (colvector) := val]

[...] NOW PREFERRED [...] syntax. The parens are enough to stop the LHS being a symbol; same as c(colvector)

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Original answer:

You were on exactly the right track: constructing an expression to be evaluated within the call to [.data.table is the data.table way to do this sort of thing. Going just a bit further, why not construct an expression that evaluates to the entire j argument (rather than just its left hand side)?

Something like this should do the trick:

## Your code so far
library(data.table)
test_dtb <- data.table(a=sample(1:100, 100),b=sample(1:100, 100),id=rep(1:10,10))
cn <- "blah"

## One solution
expr <- parse(text = paste0(cn, ":=mean(a)"))
test_dtb[,eval(expr), by=id]

## Checking the result
head(test_dtb, 4)
#     a  b id blah
# 1: 30 26  1 38.4
# 2: 83 82  2 47.4
# 3: 47 66  3 39.5
# 4: 87 23  4 65.2

Expression can be constructed with bquote.

cn <- "blah"
expr <- bquote(.(as.name(cn)):=mean(a))
test_dtb[,eval(expr), by=id]