· r-2

R: Mapping over a list of lists

As part of the coursera Data Analysis course I had the following code to download and then read in a file:

> file <- "https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7710864/data/csv_hid/ss06hid.csv"
> download.file(file, destfile="americancommunity.csv", method="curl")
> acomm <- read.csv("americancommunity.csv")

We then had to filter the data based on the values in a couple of columns and work out how many rows were returned in each case:

> one <- acomm[acomm$RMS == 4 & !is.na(acomm$RMS)
               & acomm$BDS == 3 & !is.na(acomm$BDS), c("RMS")]
> one
  [1] 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
...
[137] 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
> two <- acomm[acomm$RMS == 5 & !is.na(acomm$RMS)
               & acomm$BDS == 2 & !is.na(acomm$BDS), c("RMS")]
> two
  [1] 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
...
[375] 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

> three <- acomm[acomm$RMS == 7 & !is.na(acomm$RMS)
                 & acomm$BDS == 2 & !is.na(acomm$BDS), c("RMS")]
> three
 [1] 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7
[36] 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7

So I needed to know how many values were in the variables one, two and three.

I thought I could probably put those lists into another list and then use http://www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/Rhelp/apply.html or one of its variants to get the length of each one.

I usually use the http://www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/Rhelp/c.html function to help me create lists but it’s not helpful in this case as it creates one massive vector with all the values concatenated together:

Calling apply doesn’t have the intended outcome: ~r > lapply(c(one, two, three), length) ... [[582]] [1] 1 [[583]] [1] 1 ~

Instead what we need is the http://www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/Rhelp/list.html function: ~r > lapply(list(one, two, three), length) [[1]] [1] 148 [[2]] [1] 386 [[3]] [1] 49 ~

Et voila!

The code is on github as usual.

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