Question

I have a list and I want to remove a single element from it. How can I do this?

I’ve tried looking up what I think the obvious names for this function would be in the reference manual and I haven’t found anything appropriate.

Answer 1

I don’t know R at all, but a bit of creative googling led me here: http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/04/1919.html

The key quote from there:

I do not find explicit documentation for R on how to remove elements from lists, but trial and error tells me

myList[[5]] <- NULL

will remove the 5th element and then "close up" the hole caused by deletion of that element. That suffles the index values, So I have to be careful in dropping elements. I must work from the back of the list to the front.

A response to that post later in the thread states:

For deleting an element of a list, see R FAQ 7.1

And the relevant section of the R FAQ says:

… Do not set x[i] or x[[i]] to NULL, because this will remove the corresponding component from the list.

Which seems to tell you (in a somewhat backwards way) how to remove an element.