Extract variables from data frame by name

I had to combine a bunch of .csv files into a data frame. As the various files had no column names a side effect of the import were duplicate column names. A similar result could arise when using "cbind". As I was only interested in the eighth variable (called "V8" by default) I needed a way to extract all (and only) the V8's into a new data frame. Unfortunately the "V8"s were not at regular intervals. 

names(april2008) yields:

 [1] "station" "V7"      "V8"      "V4"      "V5"      "V6"      "V7"    
 [8] "V8"      "V5"      "V6"      "V7"      "V8"      "V6"      "V7"    
[15] "V8

I wanted to extract columns 3, 8, 12, 15.

This was achieved by using the "which" command. The initial data frame was called "april2008".

I used:

april2008[,which(names(april2008)=="V8"] -> newapril08

names(newapril08) yields:

[1] "V8"    "V8.1"  "V8.2"  "V8.3"