R change list of vectors to dataframe

Question

Suppose I have a list of different sized vectors that look like this:

> test
[[1]]
[1] 1

[[2]]
[1] 1 2 3 4

[[3]]
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7

What would be the best way to transform this into a data.frame with each list element as a column, while filling in missing rows with NA like so?

> test2
  V1 V2 V3
1  1  1  1
2 NA  2  2
3 NA  3  3
4 NA  4  4
5 NA NA  5
6 NA NA  6
7 NA NA  7

When I run do.call(cbind.fill,test), I get this:

Trying suggestion:

> do.call(rbind.data.frame, test)
  c.1L..1L..1L. c.1L..2L..2L. c.1L..3L..3L. c.1L..1L..4L. c.1L..2L..5L. c.1L..3L..6L. c.1L..1L..7L.
1             1             1             1             1             1             1             1
2             1             2             3             1             2             3             1
3             1             2             3             4             5             6             7

@joran Thanks for the suggestion. I'm trying `do.call(cbind.fill,test)` however I'm unsure of how to pass on the argument `fill=NA` to a do call function — alki, Aug 17 '15 at 20:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 17 '15 at 20:23

1

This will work:

test<-list(c(1),c(1:4),c(1:7))
library(qpcR)
do.call(qpcR:::cbind.na,test)

answered Aug 17 '15 at 20:23

Andrelrms

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 17 '15 at 20:33

1

A base R solution would be:

test <- list(1,1:4,1:7)

do.call(cbind,lapply(test, `[`, 1:7))

or dynamically:

m <- max(sapply(test, length))
do.call(cbind,lapply(test, `[`, 1:m))

answered Aug 17 '15 at 20:33

Rentrop

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R change list of vectors to dataframe

2 Answers2