elementwise combination of two lists in R

Question

Say I have two lists:

list.a <- as.list(c("a", "b", "c"))

list.b <- as.list(c("d", "e", "f"))

I would like to combine these lists recursively, such that the result would be a list of combined elements as a vector like the following:

[[1]]
[1] a d

[[2]]
[1] a e

[[3]]
[1] a f

[[4]]
[1] b d

and so on. I feel like I'm missing something relatively simple here. Any help?

Cheers.

`expand.grid(list.a, list.b)` will give you what you want in a `data.frame` structure, which is arguably more useful. — Matthew Plourde, Oct 22 '12 at 19:24
I need the resultant list for do.call to generate a series of plots with the x to be the elements of list.a, and the y to be the elements of list.b (i.e., a[1], b[1]; a[1], b[2]; ...; a[n], b[k]). — sinclairjesse, Oct 22 '12 at 19:36
see also related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6515134/combination-of-expand-grid-and-mapply — Ben Bolker, Oct 22 '12 at 21:18

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 28 '20 at 14:32

19

expand.grid(list.a, list.b) gives you the desired result in a data.frame. This tends to be the most useful format for working with data in R. However, you could get the exact structure you ask for (save the ordering) with a call to apply and lapply:

result.df <- expand.grid(list.a, list.b)
result.list <- lapply(apply(result.df, 1, identity), unlist)

If you want this list ordered by the first element:

result.list <- result.list[order(sapply(result.list, head, 1))]

edited Jul 28 '20 at 14:32

sheß

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answered Oct 22 '12 at 19:18

Matthew Plourde

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This is not reproducible. What is k? – sinclairjesse Oct 22 '12 at 19:43
+1 -- Nice to see that `expand.grid()` works on lists as well as "simpler" vectors. – Josh O'Brien Oct 22 '12 at 19:47
Sweet. Thanks! I find it strange there is not a built in function to recursively combine lists. Am I alone here? – sinclairjesse Oct 22 '12 at 19:59
This doesn't seem to work if each list contains multiple sub-elements per element. For example, if `list.a` were instead `list.a <- list(c("a","b","c"),c("x","y","z"))`, one does not get the desired result... – theforestecologist Jul 21 '17 at 01:22

dholstius · Answer 2 · 2013-08-21T21:35:38.373

11

You want mapply (if by "recursively" you mean "in parallel"):

mapply(c, list.a, list.b, SIMPLIFY=FALSE)

Or maybe this is more what you want:

unlist(lapply(list.a, function(a) lapply(list.b, function (b) c(a, b))), recursive=FALSE)

edited Aug 21 '13 at 21:35

answered May 25 '13 at 20:29

dholstius

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score 7 · Answer 3 · answered May 27 '18 at 12:56

7

Surprised nobody has mentioned this simple one liner:

as.list(outer(list.a,list.b, paste))

[[1]]
[1] "a d"

[[2]]
[1] "b d"

[[3]]
[1] "c d"

[[4]]
[1] "a e"

answered May 27 '18 at 12:56

This seems to coerce the input into strings. I tried this with integers, `x <- c(1, 2, 3)` and `y <- c(4, 5, 6)`, and it changes everything into strings. – Steven C. Howell Jul 19 '18 at 13:09

Josh O'Brien · Answer 4 · 2012-10-22T19:53:10.243

4

This gets you what you are looking for:

unlist(lapply(list.a, function(X) {
    lapply(list.b, function(Y) {
        c(X, Y)
    })
}), recursive=FALSE)

edited Oct 22 '12 at 19:53

answered Oct 22 '12 at 19:40

Josh O'Brien

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score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 22 '12 at 22:37

3

Here is a function you can pass lists to to expand

expand.list <- function(...){
   lapply(as.data.frame(t((expand.grid(...)))),c, recursive = TRUE, use.names = FALSE)}

 expand.list(list.a, list.b)

answered Oct 22 '12 at 22:37

mnel

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score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 22 '12 at 19:52

Here is a somewhat brute force approach that will, given they are the same dimensions, append list.b to list.a recursively using the append function.

# CREATE LIST OBJECTS 
  list.a <- as.list(c("a", "b", "c"))
  list.b <- as.list(c("d", "e", "f"))

# CREATE AN EMPTY LIST TO POPULATE      
list.ab <- list()

# DOUBLE LOOP TO CREATE RECURSIVE COMBINATIONS USING append
    ct=0    
      for( i in 1:length(list.a) ) {    
        for (j in 1:length(list.b) ) {
          ct=ct+1
           list.ab[[ct]] <- append(list.a[[i]], list.b[[j]])     
         } 
       }

# PRINT RESULTS
list.ab

elementwise combination of two lists in R

6 Answers6

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