rbindList: rbind a list of vectors into matrix or data.frame

In jmw86069/jamba: Jam Base Methods

rbind a list of vectors into matrix or data.frame

Description

rbind a list of vectors into matrix or data.frame

Usage

rbindList(
  x,
  emptyValue = "",
  nullValue = NULL,
  keepListNames = TRUE,
  newColnames = NULL,
  newRownames = NULL,
  fixBlanks = TRUE,
  returnDF = FALSE,
  verbose = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

x	list of atomic vector, matrix, or data.frame objects.
emptyValue	character value to use to represent missing values, whenever a blank cell is introduced into the resulting matrix
nullValue	optional value used to replace NULL entries in the input list, useful especially when the data was produced by strsplit() with "". Use nullValue="" to replace NULL with "" and preserve the original list length. Otherwise when nullValue=NULL any empty entries will be silently dropped.
keepListNames	logical whether to use list names as rownames in the resulting matrix or data.frame.
newColnames	NULL or character vector of colnames to use for the resulting matrix or data.frame.
newRownames	NULL or character vector of rownames to use for the resulting matrix or data.frame. If supplied, this value overrides the keepListNames=TRUE use of list names as rownames.
fixBlanks	logical whether to use blank values instead of repeating each vector to the length of the maximum vector length when filling each row of the matrix or data.frame.
returnDF	logical whether to return a data.frame, by default FALSE, a matrix is returned.
verbose	logical whether to print verbose output during processing.

Details

The purpose of this function is to emulate do.call(rbind, x) on a list of vectors, while specifically handling when there are different numbers of entries per vector. The output matrix number of columns will be the longest vector (or largest number of columns) in the input list x.

Instead of recycling values in each row to fill the target number of columns, this function fills cells with blank fields, with default argument fixBlanks=TRUE.

In extensive timings tests at the time this function was created, this technique was notably faster than alternatives. It runs do.call(rbind, x) then subsequently replaces recycled values with blank entries, in a manner that is notably faster than alternative approaches such as pre-processing the input data.

Value

matrix unless returnDF=TRUE in which the output is coerced to a data.frame. The rownames by default are derived from the list names, but the colnames are not derived from the vector names. If input x contains data.frame or matrix objects, the output will retain those values.

See Also

Other jam list functions: cPasteSU(), cPasteS(), cPasteUnique(), cPasteU(), cPaste(), heads(), jam_rapply(), list2df(), mergeAllXY(), mixedSorts(), relist_named(), rlengths(), sclass(), sdim(), uniques(), unnestList()

Examples

L <- list(a=LETTERS[1:4], b=letters[1:3]);
rbindList(L);
rbindList(L, returnDF=TRUE);

jmw86069/jamba documentation built on March 26, 2024, 5:26 a.m.