[R] list concatenation

[Bert Gunter]

Lists are (isomorphic to) trees with (possibly) labelled nodes. A
completely general solution in which two trees have possibly different
topologies and different labels would therefore involve identifying
the paths to leaves on each tree, e.g. via depth first search using
recursion, and unioning leaves with the same paths (which could be
quickly found in R via match() on the paths). This is a standard
exercise in a data structures course.

Considerable simplification could be effected if tree topologies
and/or labels are identical or have other restrictions on them.
However, you have not made it clear in your post whether this is the
case (it is in your example).

-- Bert

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 8:04 AM, Joshua Wiley <jwiley.psych at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Georg,
>
> This was an interesting challenge to me.  Here's what I came up with.
> The first option meets your desired result, but could get messy with
> deeper nesting.  The second is less code, but is not quite what you
> want and requires as.data.frame() to give a reasonable result for each
> list.  Calling either option a "good solution" would be rather
> generous.  I'm iinterested to see what other people do.
>
> Josh
>
> ## Data
> list.1 <- list("I"=list("A"=c("a", "b", "c"), "B"=c("d", "e", "f")),
>              "II"=list("A"=c("g", "h", "i"), "B"=c("j", "k", "l")))
> list.2 <- list("I"=list("A"=c("A", "B", "C"), "B"=c("D", "E", "F")),
>              "II"=list("A"=c("G", "H", "I"), "B"=c("J", "K", "L")))
>
> ## Try 1
> list.t1 <- list.1
>
> for(i in length(list.1)) {
>  for(j in length(list.1[[i]])) {
>    list.t1[[c(i, j)]] <- c(list.1[[c(i, j)]], list.2[[c(i, j)]])
>  }
> }
>
> ## Try 2
> list.t2 <- as.list(do.call("rbind", lapply(list(list.1, list.2),
>  as.data.frame, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)))
>
> ## Results
>
> list.t1
> list.t2
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Georg Otto <gwo at well.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Dear R gurus,
>>
>>
>> first let me apologize for a question that might hve been answered
>> before. I was not able to find the solution yet. I want to concatenate
>> two lists of lists at their lowest level.
>>
>> Suppose I have two lists of lists:
>>
>> list.1 <- list("I"=list("A"=c("a", "b", "c"), "B"=c("d", "e", "f")),
>>
>>               "II"=list("A"=c("g", "h", "i"), "B"=c("j", "k", "l")))
>>
>>
>> list.2 <- list("I"=list("A"=c("A", "B", "C"), "B"=c("D", "E", "F")),
>>
>>               "II"=list("A"=c("G", "H", "I"), "B"=c("J", "K", "L")))
>>
>>
>>
>>> list.1
>> $I
>> $I$A
>> [1] "a" "b" "c"
>>
>> $I$B
>> [1] "d" "e" "f"
>>
>>
>> $II
>> $II$A
>> [1] "g" "h" "i"
>>
>> $II$B
>> [1] "j" "k" "l"
>>
>>
>>> list.2
>> $I
>> $I$A
>> [1] "A" "B" "C"
>>
>> $I$B
>> [1] "D" "E" "F"
>>
>>
>> $II
>> $II$A
>> [1] "G" "H" "I"
>>
>> $II$B
>> [1] "J" "K" "L"
>>
>>
>> Now I want to concatenate list elements of the lowest levels, so the
>> result looks like this:
>>
>>
>> $I
>> $I$A
>> [1] "a" "b" "c" "A" "B" "C"
>>
>> $I$B
>> [1] "d" "e" "f" "D" "E" "F"
>>
>>
>> $II
>> $II$A
>> [1] "g" "h" "i" "G" "H" "I"
>>
>> $II$B
>> [1] "j" "k" "l" "J" "K" "L"
>>
>>
>> Has anybody a good solution for that?
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Georg
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Joshua Wiley
> Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
> University of California, Los Angeles
> http://www.joshuawiley.com/
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics