Efficient transpose of list

transpose is an efficient way to transpose lists, data frames or data tables.

transpose(l, fill=NA, ignore.empty=FALSE, keep.names=NULL, make.names=NULL)

Arguments

l	A list, data.frame or data.table.
fill	Default is NA. It is used to fill shorter list elements so as to return each element of the transposed result of equal lengths.
ignore.empty	Default is FALSE. TRUE will ignore length-0 list elements.
keep.names	The name of the first column in the result containing the names of the input; e.g. keep.names="rn". By default NULL and the names of the input are discarded.
make.names	The name or number of a column in the input to use as names of the output; e.g. make.names="rn". By default NULL and default names are given to the output columns.

Details

The list elements (or columns of data.frame/data.table) should be all atomic. If list elements are of unequal lengths, the value provided in fill will be used so that the resulting list always has all elements of identical lengths. The class of input object is also preserved in the transposed result.

The ignore.empty argument can be used to skip or include length-0 elements.

This is particularly useful in tasks that require splitting a character column and assigning each part to a separate column. This operation is quite common enough that a function tstrsplit is exported.

factor columns are converted to character type. Attributes are not preserved at the moment. This may change in the future.

Value

A transposed list, data.frame or data.table.

See also

data.table, tstrsplit

Examples

ll = list(1:5, 6:8)
transpose(ll)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] 1 6
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] 2 7
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] 3 8
#> 
#> [[4]]
#> [1]  4 NA
#> 
#> [[5]]
#> [1]  5 NA
#> 
setDT(transpose(ll, fill=0))[]
#>    V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
#> 1:  1  2  3  4  5
#> 2:  6  7  8  0  0

DT = data.table(x=1:5, y=6:10)
transpose(DT)
#>    V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
#> 1:  1  2  3  4  5
#> 2:  6  7  8  9 10