Chapter 7 Lists

Lists are a generic container that can hold objects of different classes. This makes lists quite handy to store heterogeneous data in R and are the preferred return type of many functions

List are created with the function list().

> x <- list(3.1416,"hello world", FALSE, c(1:10))
> x
[[1]]
[1] 3.1416

[[2]]
[1] "hello world"

[[3]]
[1] FALSE

[[4]]
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

The first element is a numeric vector, the second is a character vector, the third is a logical vector and the fourth an integer vector. As we can see, containing different classes is not a problem with lists.

However, the list is displayed a little bit different. It doesn’t print out like a vector because every element is different.