R: removing NULL elements from a list
mylist <- list(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL,
123, NULL, 456)
> mylist
[[1]]
NULL
[[2]]
NULL
[[3]]
NULL
[[4]]
NULL
[[5]]
NULL
[[6]]
NULL
[[7]]
NULL
[[8]]
NULL
[[9]]
NULL
[[10]]
NULL
[[11]]
[1] 123
[[12]]
NULL
[[13]]
[1] 456
My list has 13 elements, 11 of which are NULL. I would like to remove them, but preserve the indices of the elements that are nonempty.
mylist2 = mylist[-which(sapply(mylist, is.null))]
> mylist2
[[1]]
[1] 123
[[2]]
[1] 456
This removes the NULL elements just fine, but I don't want the nonempty elements to be reindexed, i.e, I want mylist2
to look something like this, where the indices of the nonempty entries are preserved.
> mylist2
[[11]]
[1] 123
[[13]]
[1] 456
Solution 1:
The closest you'll be able to get is to first name the list elements and then remove the NULLs.
names(x) <- seq_along(x)
## Using some higher-order convenience functions
Filter(Negate(is.null), x)
# $`11`
# [1] 123
#
# $`13`
# [1] 456
# Or, using a slightly more standard R idiom
x[sapply(x, is.null)] <- NULL
x
# $`11`
# [1] 123
#
# $`13`
# [1] 456
Solution 2:
Simply use mylist[lengths(mylist) != 0]
.
Function lengths()
was introduced in R 3.2.0 (April 2015).
Solution 3:
There's a function that automatically removes all the null entries of a list, and if the list is named, it maintains the names of the non-null entries.
This function is called compact
from the package plyr
.
l <- list( NULL, NULL, foo, bar)
names(l) <- c( "one", "two", "three", "four" )
plyr::compact(l)
If you want to preserve the indexes of the non-null entries, you can name the list as it is done in the post before and then compact your list:
names(l) <- seq_along(l)
plyr::compact(l)
Solution 4:
The purrr
package, included in Tidyverse, has elegant and fast functions for working with lists:
require(tidyverse)
# this works
compact(mylist)
# or this
mylist %>% discard(is.null)
# or this
# pipe "my_list" data object into function "keep()", make lambda function inside "keep()" to return TRUE FALSE.
mylist %>% keep( ~ !is.null(.) )
All above options are from Purrr. Output is:
[[1]]
[1] 123
[[2]]
[1] 456
Note: compact() was in plyr, but dplyr superseded plyr, and compact() stayed around but moved to purrr. Anyway, all the functions are within the parent package tidyverse.
Here's a link to the Purrr cheat sheet download:
https://rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/
Or to view the Purrr cheatsheet directly in a browser:
https://evoldyn.gitlab.io/evomics-2018/ref-sheets/R_purrr.pdf
Solution 5:
If you want to keep the names you can do
a <- list(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL,
123, NULL, 456)
non_null_names <- which(!sapply(a, is.null))
a <- a[non_null_names]
names(a) <- non_null_names
a
You can then access the elements like so
a[['11']]
num <- 11
a[[as.character(num)]]
a[[as.character(11)]]
a$`11`
You can't get them in the neat [[11]]
, [[13]]
notation, though, because those represent numerical indices.