How to form a dataframe in R using lists

Question

I have child_sequences as list in R

child = c("a","b","c")

I generate this child sequence over and over again based on some logic using a for loop, let say -

child1 = c("a","b","c")
child2 = c("b","a","c")
child3 = c("a","a","b")

and so on.

I want all this lists to be stored as a dataframe so that I can save it to csv and analyze it later.

How do I do it efficiently in R? How can I keep appending this list to dataframe using the same for loop?

My dataframe should look like -

a , b ,c 
b, a, c
a, a, b

Those aren't lists you have. Those are vectors. Lists and vectors are different things in R. — MrFlick
– MrFlick, Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 15:53
You can use is.list() to see if something is a list. But building a data.frame row-by-row in R is one of the most inefficient things you can do in R. It's much better to build the data frame column-by-column. What's the actual scenario you are dealing with. — MrFlick
– MrFlick, Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 15:56
thank you for the help. I am trying to create a data frame from lists. I can convert vector to list in each for loop call. But at the end I am trying to create a dataframe from this list. — Regressor
– Regressor, Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 16:17

tyluRp · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-22 15:53:26Z

2

How about:

child1 = c("a","b","c")
child2 = c("b","a","c")
child3 = c("a","a","b")

child_list <- list(child1, child2, child3)

as.data.frame(do.call(rbind, child_list))

  V1 V2 V3
1  a  b  c
2  b  a  c
3  a  a  b

answered Jun 22, 2018 at 15:53

tyluRp

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akrun · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-22 16:16:42Z

0

If there are many objects of the same pattern name, we can use ls (specify the pattern and with mget return the object values in a list. Here, is another option with bind_rows (from dplyr)

library(dplyr)
bind_cols(mget(ls(pattern = "^child\\d+$")))
# A tibble: 3 x 3
#  child1 child2 child3
#  <chr>  <chr>  <chr> 
#1 a      b      a     
#2 b      a      a     
#3 c      c      b

edited Jun 22, 2018 at 16:16

answered Jun 22, 2018 at 15:56

akrun

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