gprofiler | wide profiler , combining multiple sampling profilers | Monitoring library

I am working with microarray data within an ExpressionSet object downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus. The rows of the expression data in this object are labeled with probe names, but for downstream analysis I really need the gene symbols.

Thankfully, the individuals that compiled this dataset included the corresponding gene symbols in the metadata that accompanies this kind of object.

I am trying to write a for loop within a function that looks at the list of variable labels (effectively row names for the metadata), determines whether a column called "GENE_SYMOBL" is present, then either writes those gene symbols to a vector, or moves on and converts the probe names to gene symbols using gprofileR.

I don't want my if else statement to run for each iteration of my for loop, I just want it to run after the if statement has determined if any of the row names are "GENE_SYMBOL".

So far I have written the for loop with the if statement but can't figure out how to put the condition if ANY of the column names match, then do A, if none match then do B.