R - Difference between sapply and vapply function

Asked Aug 18 '17 at 12:08

Active Aug 18 '17 at 12:08

Viewed 37 times

I've been studying r language, and I started to use lapply and sapply functions.

But I've seen programmers recommending to use vapply instead of sapply.

I've searched in the documentation about sapply, and found the difference between sapply and lapply:

https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/memisc/versions/0.99.13.2/topics/Sapply

Sapply is equivalent to sapply, except that it preserves the dimension and dimension names of the argument X. It also preserves the dimension of results of the function FUN. It is intended for application to results e.g. of a call to by. Lapply is an analog to lapply insofar as it does not try to simplify the resulting list of results of FUN.

So I was wondering, what is the difference between sapply and vapply functions ? What function is better to use, and in what scenarios?

asked Aug 18 '17 at 12:08

Gabriel Mesquita

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`vapply` is a bit faster than `sapply` – Sotos Aug 18 '17 at 12:10
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`vapply` is safer, `sapply` is more convenient. Always use `vapply` in non-interactive code or packages. – Roland Aug 18 '17 at 12:13
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Why are you looking at documentation for some package when trying to understand base R functions? – Roland Aug 18 '17 at 12:14

R - Difference between sapply and vapply function

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