On Aug 10, 2011, at 3:58 PM, Liviu Andronic wrote:
On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 9:32 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net
> wrote:
Thanks all! This is perfect, and very R-ish: never where a novice
would expect it to be.
Well, since `unlist` is linked in the See Also on the help page for
`list`,
I can only hope you meant that in complete jest.
More or less. I would have expected that to transform a 'list' into a
'vector' I should look into 'as.vector' (or its See Also), and I would
have never guessed to look for 'unlist'.
I am not sure if ?as.vector would necessarily be the place one would
have wanted to stay after reading that vector() could return a list. I
would also think that attempting this on your proffered data example
would have made you want to search elsewhere:
> is.vector(x)
[1] TRUE
You probably didn't realize that lists _are_ vectors before this.
R documentation is sometimes (often?) hard to parse, and when learning
R more often than not you're looking in the wrong place. But yes, it
was intended as humour (although I did expect to get grilled).
Hopefully this expected invitation to grilling will not result in
severe burns. I note that one of the *apply family would have been
successful in returning the desired object in conjunction with c() :
> rapply(x, c)
[1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l"
`rapply` is designed to do a complete traversal of the list structure
and its default "how" argument is "unlist". It was linked from the
page where you were looking at `simplify2array`.
As the Posting Guide says: "... sometimes `read the manual' is the
appropriate response".
I did, but I was on the wrong track. It actually hasn't occurred to me
to check ?list, but See Also in both ?as.vector and ?simplify2array
does not link to 'unlist'.
Perhaps not immediately but after on hop it does. The link to is.list
on ?as.vector goes to the help(list) page.
Since these are the two places where I
turned to in the first place, and I have also played extensively with
sapply(..., simplify=...) arguments, and there was nothing obvious in
their respective See Also, I figured that I did my homework reasonably
well.
I take your meaning. Learning to keep straight modes straight (atomic
versus recursive) and the various classes is part of the "learning
cliff".
Regards
Liviu
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
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