[R] List to matrix or to vectors conversion

[Dan davison]

 <Ted.Harding <at> manchester.ac.uk> writes:

> 
> On 12-Feb-10 13:14:29, Juan Tomas Sayago wrote:
> > Dear list,
> > I have a list with 1000 x1000 lines and columns

Lists have neither lines nor columns. Can you explain exactly what you have?
E.g. show us the code that created your "list"?

> do you know how I can
> > convert it to matrrix or data.frame.
> > Thanks.
> > Juan
> 
> as.data.frame() will convert it to a dataframe. If you then apply
> as.matrix() to the result you will get a matrix:
> 
>   L <- list(X=c(1,2,3),Y=c(4,5,6),Z=c(7,8,9))

If you want a matrix as opposed to a data.frame (e.g. your list entries are all
numeric), and the data set is large, this more efficient method might be useful:


> matrix(unlist(L), nrow=3)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    4    7
[2,]    2    5    8
[3,]    3    6    9

If it's not obvious to you what that does, consider:

> unlist(L)
X1 X2 X3 Y1 Y2 Y3 Z1 Z2 Z3 
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 

> matrix(unlist(L), nrow=3, byrow=TRUE)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    2    3
[2,]    4    5    6
[3,]    7    8    9
> matrix(unlist(L), nrow=3, byrow=FALSE)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    4    7
[2,]    2    5    8
[3,]    3    6    9



>   L
>   # $X
>   # [1] 1 2 3
>   # $Y
>   # [1] 4 5 6
>   # $Z
>   # [1] 7 8 9
> 
>   D <- as.data.frame(L)
>   D
>   #   X Y Z
>   # 1 1 4 7
>   # 2 2 5 8
>   # 3 3 6 9
> 
>   M <- as.matrix(D)
>   M
>   #      X Y Z
>   # [1,] 1 4 7
>   # [2,] 2 5 8
>   # [3,] 3 6 9
> 
> Note that applying as.matrix() directly to the original L will
> not work. It returns a list, not a matrix.
> 
> Ted.
> 
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> Date: 12-Feb-10                                       Time: 13:40:32
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