[R] Can a matrix have 'list' as rows/columns?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Worik R <worikr at gmail.com> wrote:
> After a lot of processing I get a matrix into M.  I expected each row and
> column to be a vector.  But it is a list.

Lists are also vectors, e.g.

> x <- list()
> is.vector(x)
[1] TRUE
> y <- vector("list", length=3)
> str(y)
List of 3
 $ : NULL
 $ : NULL
 $ : NULL
>

See ?list


/HB

>
> R-Inferno says...
>
> "Arrays (including matrices) can be subscripted with a matrix of positive
> numbers. The subscripting matrix has as many columns as there are dimensions
> in the array—so two columns for a matrix. The result is a vector (not an
> array)
> containing the selected items."
>
> My version of R:
> version.string R version 2.12.1 (2010-12-16)
>
> Here is an example...
>
>> Qm <- c("aaa", "bbb", "ccc")
>> DF <- data.frame(Name=sample(Qm, replace=TRUE, size=22), Value=runif(22),
> stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
>> M <- sapply(Qm, function(nm, DF){last(DF[DF[, "Name"]==nm,])}, DF)
>> class(M)
> [1] "matrix"
>> class(M[,1])
> [1] "list"
>> class(M[1,])
> [1] "list"
>> M
>      aaa       bbb      ccc
> Name  "aaa"     "bbb"    "ccc"
> Value 0.4702648 0.274498 0.5529691
>> DF
>   Name      Value
> 1   ccc 0.99948920
> 2   aaa 0.51921281
> 3   aaa 0.10803943
> 4   aaa 0.82265847
> 5   ccc 0.83237260
> 6   bbb 0.88250933
> 7   aaa 0.41836131
> 8   aaa 0.66197290
> 9   ccc 0.01911771
> 10  ccc 0.99994699
> 11  bbb 0.35719884
> 12  ccc 0.86274858
> 13  bbb 0.57528579
> 14  aaa 0.12452158
> 15  aaa 0.44167731
> 16  aaa 0.11660019
> 17  ccc 0.55296911
> 18  aaa 0.12796890
> 19  bbb 0.44595741
> 20  bbb 0.93024768
> 21  aaa 0.47026475
> 22  bbb 0.27449801
>>
>
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