How to store elements of a list into independent vectors

Question

I want to transform the elements of a list into independent vectors that are saved in and usably from the global environment.

Imagine a list "the.list" that consists of three elements.

$a
[1] 1 2 3
$b
[1] 6 7 8
$c
[1] 11 12 13

Is there a way of storing each of the elements as individual vectors?

I have tried to use lapply (the.list, as.vector) , but the result is the same as simply printing the list. Also, using unlist (the.list) returns a simple vector of 1:15, in which the distinct sets (1:3, 6:8, 11:13) are non distinguishable.

I am looking for a function/way to transform the elements of the list into what would would manually be

a<-c(1:3)
b<-c(6:8)
c<-c(11:13)

Many thanks.

You can use `assign` but what is the problem in keeping them in a `list` ? — Ronak Shah, Jul 01 '19 at 13:44
"assign" does the job! Thanks. I need the elements for further subsetting of another character vector. — sant, Jul 05 '19 at 15:34

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '19 at 13:58

1

# Creating some data
my_list <- list(a = c(1:3), b = c(4:5), c = c(6:10))

# Assigning each vector to element name    
for (i in 1:length(my_list)) {
  assign(names(my_list[i]), as.vector(my_list[i]))
}

answered Jul 01 '19 at 13:58

Esben Eickhardt

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How to store elements of a list into independent vectors

1 Answers1