Question

I have a list like this:

arg0 <- list(code = "a", n = rep(10, 3))

The number of objects in a list is variable. The objects of the list are vectors — only one dimensional objects.

I want to make a procedure to convert the list to a one row data.frame like this:

> data.frame(code = "a", n.1 = 10, n.2 = 10, n.3 = 10)
  code n.1 n.2 n.3
1    a  10  10  10

I have this solution currently:

a <- stack(arg0)
b <- data.frame(t(a[,1]))
names(b) <- a[,2]
b <- data.frame(b)

Where b is almost the result I want to achieve:

> b
  code  n n.1 n.2
1    a 10  10  10

Two questions:

1. Is there more elegant way to achieve the result?
2. Do you have any idea how to get the numbering of the duplicate colnames like c(n.1,
n.2, n.3)?

Answer 1

If you want to keep the different data types of the list’s objects, the following command can be used:

data.frame(lapply(arg0, function(x) t(data.frame(x))))

The output:

  code n.1 n.2 n.3
x    a  10  10  10

The values in columns two to four are still numeric.