Predictive Hacks

Hack: The ‘[‘ in R lists

subset lists

Assume that you have a list and you want to get the n-th element of each component or generally to subset the list. You can use the command sapply(list, "[", c(1,2,3,..))

Let’s see this in practice.

mylist<-list(id = 1:10,
             gender = c("m","m","m","f","f","f","m","f","f","f"),
             amt = c(5,20,30,10,20,50,5,20,10,30)
             )

mylist
 

Output:

$id
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

$gender
 [1] "m" "m" "m" "f" "f" "f" "m" "f" "f" "f"

$amt
 [1]  5 20 30 10 20 50  5 20 10 30

Let’s say that we want to get the 3rd and 6th element of the list:

sapply(mylist, "[", c(3,6))
 

Output:

     id  gender amt 
[1,] "3" "m"    "30"
[2,] "6" "f"    "50"

Notice:

As a friend mentioned below, the issue with the sapply and the matrix is that it expects the data type everywhere and it converts everything to a character since the “gender” is a character variable.

Another approach will be to use the lapply:

lapply(mylist, "[", c(3,6))
 

Output:

$id
[1] 3 6

$gender
[1] "m" "f"

$amt
[1] 30 50

Now, if we want the results to appear as data.frame

data.frame(lapply(mylist, "[", c(3,6)))
 

Output:

  id gender amt
1  3      m  30
2  6      f  50

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4 thoughts on “Hack: The ‘[‘ in R lists”

  1. And for those, who feel that “[” is not a good name for a function, magrittr package comes with so called aliases.

    An alias for [ is extract, so you may use:

    library(magrittr)
    sapply(mylist, extract, c(3,6))

    to get the same result.

    Reply
  2. One possible drawback to using sapply() in this case is that the result is “simplified” into a matrix and everything is converted to character since a matrix can only contain one data type. Using lapply() will preserve the type:

    > lapply(mylist, “[“, c(3,6))
    [[1]]
    [1] 3 6

    [[2]]
    [1] “m” “f”

    [[3]]
    [1] 30 50

    Also, to include names in your list, you need to use “=” instead of ” mylist sapply(mylist, “[“, c(3,6))
    id gender amt
    [1,] “3” “m” “30”
    [2,] “6” “f” “50”

    > lapply(mylist, “[“, c(3,6))
    $id
    [1] 3 6

    $gender
    [1] “m” “f”

    $amt
    [1] 30 50

    > as.data.frame(lapply(mylist, “[“, c(3,6)), col.names = names(mylist))
    id gender amt
    1 3 m 30
    2 6 f 50

    Reply

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