How to automate making a list of lists in R - r

I can make this list by hand:
list( list(n=1) , list(n=2), list(n=3) )
But how do I automate this, for instance if I want n to go up to 10? I tried as.list(1:10), which firstly is a different type of data structure, and secondly I couldn't work out how to specify n.
I'm hoping the answer can be expanded to multiple element lists, e.g. all combinations of 1:3 and c('A','B'):
list( list(n=1,z='A') , list(n=2,z='A'), list(n=3,z='A'),
list(n=1,z='B') , list(n=2,z='B'), list(n=3,z='B') )
Background: I'll be using it along the lines of: lapply( outer_list, function(params) do.call(FUN,params) )
UPDATE:
It was difficult to choose which answer to give the tick to. I went with the expand.grid approach as it can scale to more than two parameters more easily; the use of mapply as shown in the comment makes the two examples above look reasonably compact and readable:
outer_list=with( expand.grid(n=1:10,stringsAsFactors=F),
mapply(list, n=n, SIMPLIFY=F)
)
outer_list=with( expand.grid(n=1:3,z=c('A','Z'), stringsAsFactors=F),
mapply(list, n=n, z=z, SIMPLIFY=F)
)
They violate the DRY principle, by repeating the parameter names in the mapply() call, which bothers me a little. So, when it bothers me enough I will use the alply call as shown in Sebastian's answer.

You don't need to expand using expand.grid.
L <- mapply(function(x, y) list("n"=x,"z"=y),
rep(1:10, each=10), LETTERS[1:10],
SIMPLIFY=FALSE)
EDIT (see comment below)
L <- mapply(function(x, y) list("n"=x,"z"=y),
rep(1:10, each=length(LETTERS[1:10])), LETTERS[1:10],
SIMPLIFY=FALSE)

vals <- expand.grid(n=1:3, z=c("A", "B"),
KEEP.OUT.ATTRS=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
library(plyr)
alply(vals, 1, as.list)
$`1`
$`1`$n
[1] 1
$`1`$z
[1] "A"
$`2`
$`2`$n
[1] 2
$`2`$z
[1] "A"
$`3`
$`3`$n
[1] 3
$`3`$z
[1] "A"
$`4`
$`4`$n
[1] 1
$`4`$z
[1] "B"
$`5`
$`5`$n
[1] 2
$`5`$z
[1] "B"
$`6`
$`6`$n
[1] 3
$`6`$z
[1] "B"
attr(,"split_type")
[1] "array"
attr(,"split_labels")
n z
1 1 A
2 2 A
3 3 A
4 1 B
5 2 B
6 3 B

Related

mapply on pairs of elements in a lists in R

If I have a symmetric binary operator that I want to apply over the pairs of elements from a list, is there an easy way I can do this in R? I tried:
A <- list(1,2,3)
mapply(function(x,y) x+y, A,A)
but this only gives x[n]+y[n] for all n=1..N but I want x[n]+y[m] for all m=1..n, n=1..N returned as a list. outer(..) does that for m=1..N, n=1..N which involves redundant computation so I want to discount that.
Notice I don't want solution to this simple example. I need a general solution that works for non-numeric input as well. The thing I'm trying to do is like:
mapply(function(set_1, set_2) setequal(intersect(set_1, set_2), set_3), list_of_sets, list_of_sets)
In both cases addition and intersection are symmetric. In the first example, I expect list(3,4,5) from list(1+2,1+3,2+3). For the second case me input list_of_sets is:
> list_of_sets
[[1]]
numeric(0)
[[2]]
[1] 1
[[3]]
[1] 2
[[4]]
[1] 1 2
[[5]]
[1] 3
[[6]]
[1] 1 3
[[7]]
[1] 2 3
[[8]]
[1] 1 2 3
and set_3 being c(1,2) as a simple example.
You may use outer -
values <- c(1, 2, 3)
outer(values, values, `+`)
# [,1] [,2] [,3]
#[1,] 2 3 4
#[2,] 3 4 5
#[3,] 4 5 6
outer also works for non-numeric input. If the function that you want to apply is not vectorised you can use Vectorize. Since OP did not provide an example I have created one of my own.
list_of_sets_1 <- list(c('a', 'b', 'c'), c('a'))
list_of_sets_2 <- list(c('a', 'c'), c('a', 'b'))
fun <- function(x, y) intersect(x, y)
result <- outer(list_of_sets_1, list_of_sets_2, Vectorize(fun))
result
We need combn to do pairwise computation without redundancy
combn(A, 2, FUN = function(x) x[[1]] + x[[2]], simplify = FALSE)
-output
[[1]]
[1] 3
[[2]]
[1] 4
[[3]]
[1] 5
This will also work with non-numeric elements
list_of_sets <- list(c('a', 'b', 'c'), "a", c("a", "c"))
combn(list_of_sets, 2, FUN = function(x) Reduce(intersect, x), simplify = FALSE)
-output
[[1]]
[1] "a"
[[2]]
[1] "a" "c"
[[3]]
[1] "a"
We may also do
combn(list_of_sets, 2, FUN = function(x)
setequal(intersect(x[[1]], x[[2]]), set_3), simplify = FALSE)

Looping over multiple lists with base R

In python we can do this..
numbers = [1, 2, 3]
characters = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
for item in zip(numbers, characters):
print(item[0], item[1])
(1, 'foo')
(2, 'bar')
(3, 'baz')
We can also unpack the tuple rather than using the index.
for num, char in zip(numbers, characters):
print(num, char)
(1, 'foo')
(2, 'bar')
(3, 'baz')
How can we do the same using base R?
To do something like this in an R-native way, you'd use the idea of a data frame. A data frame has multiple variables which can be of different types, and each row is an observation of each variable.
d <- data.frame(numbers = c(1, 2, 3),
characters = c('foo', 'bar', 'baz'))
d
## numbers characters
## 1 1 foo
## 2 2 bar
## 3 3 baz
You then access each row using matrix notation, where leaving an index blank includes everything.
d[1,]
## numbers characters
## 1 1 foo
You can then loop over the rows of the data frame to do whatever you want to do, presumably you actually want to do something more interesting than printing.
for(i in seq_len(nrow(d))) {
print(d[i,])
}
## numbers characters
## 1 1 foo
## numbers characters
## 2 2 bar
## numbers characters
## 3 3 baz
For another option, how about mapply, which is the closest analog to zip I can think of in R. Here I'm using the c function to make a new vector, but you could use any function you'd like:
numbers<- c(1, 2, 3)
characters<- c('foo', 'bar', 'baz')
mapply(c,numbers, characters, SIMPLIFY = FALSE)
[[1]]
[1] "1" "foo"
[[2]]
[1] "2" "bar"
[[3]]
[1] "3" "baz"
Which way is of most use depends on what you want to do with your output, but as the other answers mention, a dataframe is the most natural approach in R (and pandas dataframe probably in python).
To index a vector in R, where the vector is variable x would be x[1]. This would return the first element of the vector. R element numbering starts at 1 in contrast to Python which starts at 0.
For this problem it would be:
x = seq(1,10)
j = seq(11,20)
for (i in 1:length(x)){
print (c(x[i],j[i]))
}
Many functions in R are vectorized and don't require loops:
numbers = c(1, 2, 3)
characters = c('foo', 'bar', 'baz')
myList <- list(numbers, characters)
myDF <- data.frame(numbers,characters, stringsAsFactors = F)
print(myList)
print(myDF)
This is the conceptual equivalent:
for (item in Map(list,numbers,characters)){ # though most of the time you would actually do all your work inside Map
print(item[c(1,2)])
}
# [[1]]
# [1] 1
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "a"
#
# [[1]]
# [1] 2
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "b"
#
# [[1]]
# [1] 3
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "c"
#
# [[1]]
# [1] 4
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "d"
#
# [[1]]
# [1] 5
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "e"
Though most of the time you would actually do all your work inside Map and do something like this:
Map(function(nu,ch){print(data.frame(nu,ch))},numbers,characters)
This is the closest I could get to a clone:
zip <- function(...){ Map(list,...)}
print2 <- function(...){do.call(cat,c(list(...),"\n"))}
for (item in zip(numbers,characters)){
print2(item[[1]],item[[2]])
}
# 1 a
# 2 b
# 3 c
# 4 d
# 5 e
to be able to call items by their names (still works with indices):
zip <- function(...){
names <- sapply(substitute(list(...))[-1],deparse)
Map(function(...){setNames(list(...),names)}, ...)
}
for (item in zip(numbers,characters)){
print2(item[["numbers"]],item[["characters"]])
}
The tidyverse solution would be to use purrr::map2 function. Ex:
numbers <- c(1, 2, 3)
characters <- c('foo', 'bar', 'baz')
map2(numbers, characters, ~paste0(.x, ',', .y))
#[[1]]
#[1] "1,foo"
#[[2]]
#[1] "2,bar"
#[[3]]
#[1] "3,baz"
See API here
Other scalable alternatives: Store the vectors in the list and iterate over.
vect1 <- c(1, 2, 3)
vect1 <- c('foo', 'bar', 'baz')
vect2 <- c('a', 'b', 'c')
idx_list <- list(vect1, vect2)
idx_vect <- c(1:length(idx_list[[1]]))
for(i in idx_vect){
x <- idx_list[[1]][i]
j <- idx_list[[2]][i]
print(c(i, x, j))
}

How to get a named list element in R if the appearance of the element is conditional?

I want to include a list element c in a list L in R and name it C.
The example is as follows:
a=c(1,2,3)
b=c("a","b","c")
c=rnorm(3)
L<-list(A=a,
B=b,
C=c)
print(L)
## $A
## [1] 1 2 3
##
## $B
## [1] "a" "b" "c"
##
## $C
## [1] -2.2398424 0.9561929 -0.6172520
Now I want to introduce a condition on C, so it is only included in
the list if C.bool==T:
C.bool<-T
L<-list(A=a,
B=b,
if(C.bool) C=c)
print(L)
## $A
## [1] 1 2 3
##
## $B
## [1] "a" "b" "c"
##
## [[3]]
## [1] -2.2398424 0.9561929 -0.6172520
Now, however, the list element of c is not being named as specified in
the list statement. What's the trick here?
Edit: The intention is to only include the element in the list if the condition is met (no NULL shoul be included otherwise). Can this be done within the core definition of the list?
I don't know why you want to do it "without adding C outside the core definition of the list?" but if you're content with two lists in a single c then:
L <- c(list(A=a, B=b), if(C.bool) list(C=c))
If you really want one list but don't mind subsetting after creation then
L <- list(A=a, B=b, C=if(C.bool) c)[c(TRUE, TRUE, C.bool)]
(pace David Arenburg, isTRUE() omitted for brevity)
you can try this if you want to keep the names
L2 <-list(A=a,
B=b,
C = if (TRUE) c)
You can of course replace TRUE with the statement containing C.bool
You could place the if statement outside the core definition of the list, like this:
L <- list(A = a, B= b)
if (isTRUE(C.bool)) L$C <- c
#> L
#$A
#[1] 1 2 3
#
#$B
#[1] "a" "b" "c"
#
#$C
#[1] -0.7631459 0.7353929 -0.2085646
(Edit with isTRUE() owing to the comment by #DavidArenburg)
As a combination of the previous answers by #MamounBenghezal, #user20637
and the comment made by #DavidArenburg, I would suggest this generalized
version that does not depend on the length of the list:
L <- Filter(Negate(is.null),
x = list(A = a, B = b, C = if (isTRUE(C.bool)) c, D = "foo"))

combine lists in R without knowing beforehand the number of lists to combine

If I was starting with a list A that contained lists N and M, which contain equal number of elements:
A = list( N=list( a=c(1,1), b=c(2,2)),
M=list( a=c(1,1), b=c(2,2)) )
I would do the following to combine each of the elements from the lists N and M into new lists
B = mapply( FUN=list, A[[1]], A[[2]], SIMPLIFY=FALSE )
to get
>B
$a
$a[[1]]
[1] 1 1
$a[[2]]
[1] 1 1
$b
$b[[1]]
[1] 2 2
$b[[2]]
[1] 2 2
How can I do the same thing as above if I don't know beforehand the number of lists that the list A will have?
There is probably a better solution to your problem, but if you literally want to "do the same thing, but without knowing size of A", you can do the following:
do.call(function(...) mapply(..., FUN = list, SIMPLIFY = FALSE), A)
try using tapply:
tapply(U, inds, list)
Where
U <- unlist(A, recursive=FALSE)
inds <- rep(seq_along(A[[1]]), length(A))

How can I remove an element from a list?

I have a list and I want to remove a single element from it. How can I do this?
I've tried looking up what I think the obvious names for this function would be in the reference manual and I haven't found anything appropriate.
If you don't want to modify the list in-place (e.g. for passing the list with an element removed to a function), you can use indexing: negative indices mean "don't include this element".
x <- list("a", "b", "c", "d", "e"); # example list
x[-2]; # without 2nd element
x[-c(2, 3)]; # without 2nd and 3rd
Also, logical index vectors are useful:
x[x != "b"]; # without elements that are "b"
This works with dataframes, too:
df <- data.frame(number = 1:5, name = letters[1:5])
df[df$name != "b", ]; # rows without "b"
df[df$number %% 2 == 1, ] # rows with odd numbers only
I don't know R at all, but a bit of creative googling led me here: http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/04/1919.html
The key quote from there:
I do not find explicit documentation for R on how to remove elements from lists, but trial and error tells me
myList[[5]] <- NULL
will remove the 5th element and then "close up" the hole caused by deletion of that element. That suffles the index values, So I have to be careful in dropping elements. I must work from the back of the list to the front.
A response to that post later in the thread states:
For deleting an element of a list, see R FAQ 7.1
And the relevant section of the R FAQ says:
... Do not set x[i] or x[[i]] to NULL, because this will remove the corresponding component from the list.
Which seems to tell you (in a somewhat backwards way) how to remove an element.
I would like to add that if it's a named list you can simply use within.
l <- list(a = 1, b = 2)
> within(l, rm(a))
$b
[1] 2
So you can overwrite the original list
l <- within(l, rm(a))
to remove element named a from list l.
Here is how the remove the last element of a list in R:
x <- list("a", "b", "c", "d", "e")
x[length(x)] <- NULL
If x might be a vector then you would need to create a new object:
x <- c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e")
x <- x[-length(x)]
Work for lists and vectors
Removing Null elements from a list in single line :
x=x[-(which(sapply(x,is.null),arr.ind=TRUE))]
Cheers
If you have a named list and want to remove a specific element you can try:
lst <- list(a = 1:4, b = 4:8, c = 8:10)
if("b" %in% names(lst)) lst <- lst[ - which(names(lst) == "b")]
This will make a list lst with elements a, b, c. The second line removes element b after it checks that it exists (to avoid the problem #hjv mentioned).
or better:
lst$b <- NULL
This way it is not a problem to try to delete a non-existent element (e.g. lst$g <- NULL)
Use - (Negative sign) along with position of element, example if 3rd element is to be removed use it as your_list[-3]
Input
my_list <- list(a = 3, b = 3, c = 4, d = "Hello", e = NA)
my_list
# $`a`
# [1] 3
# $b
# [1] 3
# $c
# [1] 4
# $d
# [1] "Hello"
# $e
# [1] NA
Remove single element from list
my_list[-3]
# $`a`
# [1] 3
# $b
# [1] 3
# $d
# [1] "Hello"
# $e
[1] NA
Remove multiple elements from list
my_list[c(-1,-3,-2)]
# $`d`
# [1] "Hello"
# $e
# [1] NA
my_list[c(-3:-5)]
# $`a`
# [1] 3
# $b
# [1] 3
my_list[-seq(1:2)]
# $`c`
# [1] 4
# $d
# [1] "Hello"
# $e
# [1] NA
There's the rlist package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rlist/index.html) to deal with various kinds of list operations.
Example (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rlist/vignettes/Filtering.html):
library(rlist)
devs <-
list(
p1=list(name="Ken",age=24,
interest=c("reading","music","movies"),
lang=list(r=2,csharp=4,python=3)),
p2=list(name="James",age=25,
interest=c("sports","music"),
lang=list(r=3,java=2,cpp=5)),
p3=list(name="Penny",age=24,
interest=c("movies","reading"),
lang=list(r=1,cpp=4,python=2)))
list.remove(devs, c("p1","p2"))
Results in:
# $p3
# $p3$name
# [1] "Penny"
#
# $p3$age
# [1] 24
#
# $p3$interest
# [1] "movies" "reading"
#
# $p3$lang
# $p3$lang$r
# [1] 1
#
# $p3$lang$cpp
# [1] 4
#
# $p3$lang$python
# [1] 2
Don't know if you still need an answer to this but I found from my limited (3 weeks worth of self-teaching R) experience with R that, using the NULL assignment is actually wrong or sub-optimal especially if you're dynamically updating a list in something like a for-loop.
To be more precise, using
myList[[5]] <- NULL
will throw the error
myList[[5]] <- NULL : replacement has length zero
or
more elements supplied than there are to replace
What I found to work more consistently is
myList <- myList[[-5]]
Just wanted to quickly add (because I didn't see it in any of the answers) that, for a named list, you can also do l["name"] <- NULL. For example:
l <- list(a = 1, b = 2, cc = 3)
l['b'] <- NULL
In the case of named lists I find those helper functions useful
member <- function(list,names){
## return the elements of the list with the input names
member..names <- names(list)
index <- which(member..names %in% names)
list[index]
}
exclude <- function(list,names){
## return the elements of the list not belonging to names
member..names <- names(list)
index <- which(!(member..names %in% names))
list[index]
}
aa <- structure(list(a = 1:10, b = 4:5, fruits = c("apple", "orange"
)), .Names = c("a", "b", "fruits"))
> aa
## $a
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
## $b
## [1] 4 5
## $fruits
## [1] "apple" "orange"
> member(aa,"fruits")
## $fruits
## [1] "apple" "orange"
> exclude(aa,"fruits")
## $a
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
## $b
## [1] 4 5
Using lapply and grep:
lst <- list(a = 1:4, b = 4:8, c = 8:10)
# say you want to remove a and c
toremove<-c("a","c")
lstnew<-lst[-unlist(lapply(toremove, function(x) grep(x, names(lst)) ) ) ]
#or
pattern<-"a|c"
lstnew<-lst[-grep(pattern, names(lst))]
You can also negatively index from a list using the extract function of the magrittr package to remove a list item.
a <- seq(1,5)
b <- seq(2,6)
c <- seq(3,7)
l <- list(a,b,c)
library(magrittr)
extract(l,-1) #simple one-function method
[[1]]
[1] 2 3 4 5 6
[[2]]
[1] 3 4 5 6 7
There are a few options in the purrr package that haven't been mentioned:
pluck and assign_in work well with nested values and you can access it using a combination of names and/or indices:
library(purrr)
l <- list("a" = 1:2, "b" = 3:4, "d" = list("e" = 5:6, "f" = 7:8))
# select values (by name and/or index)
all.equal(pluck(l, "d", "e"), pluck(l, 3, "e"), pluck(l, 3, 1))
[1] TRUE
# or if element location stored in a vector use !!!
pluck(l, !!! as.list(c("d", "e")))
[1] 5 6
# remove values (modifies in place)
pluck(l, "d", "e") <- NULL
# assign_in to remove values with name and/or index (does not modify in place)
assign_in(l, list("d", 1), NULL)
$a
[1] 1 2
$b
[1] 3 4
$d
$d$f
[1] 7 8
Or you can remove values using modify_list by assigning zap() or NULL:
all.equal(list_modify(l, a = zap()), list_modify(l, a = NULL))
[1] TRUE
You can remove or keep elements using a predicate function with discard and keep:
# remove numeric elements
discard(l, is.numeric)
$d
$d$e
[1] 5 6
$d$f
[1] 7 8
# keep numeric elements
keep(l, is.numeric)
$a
[1] 1 2
$b
[1] 3 4
Here is a simple solution that can be done using base R. It removes the number 5 from the original list of numbers. You can use the same method to remove whatever element you want from a list.
#the original list
original_list = c(1:10)
#the list element to remove
remove = 5
#the new list (which will not contain whatever the `remove` variable equals)
new_list = c()
#go through all the elements in the list and add them to the new list if they don't equal the `remove` variable
counter = 1
for (n in original_list){
if (n != ){
new_list[[counter]] = n
counter = counter + 1
}
}
The new_list variable no longer contains 5.
new_list
# [1] 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10
How about this? Again, using indices
> m <- c(1:5)
> m
[1] 1 2 3 4 5
> m[1:length(m)-1]
[1] 1 2 3 4
or
> m[-(length(m))]
[1] 1 2 3 4
You can use which.
x<-c(1:5)
x
#[1] 1 2 3 4 5
x<-x[-which(x==4)]
x
#[1] 1 2 3 5
if you'd like to avoid numeric indices, you can use
a <- setdiff(names(a),c("name1", ..., "namen"))
to delete names namea...namen from a. this works for lists
> l <- list(a=1,b=2)
> l[setdiff(names(l),"a")]
$b
[1] 2
as well as for vectors
> v <- c(a=1,b=2)
> v[setdiff(names(v),"a")]
b
2

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