In this chapter, you'll learn how to handle lists, the data structure R uses for complex, hierarchical objects. You're already familiar with vectors, R's data structure for 1d objects. Lists extend these ideas to model objects that are like trees. You can create a hierarchical structure with a list because unlike vectors, a list can contain other lists.
If you've worked with list-like objects before, you're probably familiar with the for loop. I'll talk a little bit about for loops here, but the focus will be functions from the __purrr__ package. purrr makes it easier to work with lists by eliminating common for loop boilerplate so you can focus on the specifics. The apply family of functions in base R (`apply()`, `lapply()`, `tapply()`, etc) solve a similar problem, but purrr is more consistent and easier to learn.
This structure makes it easier to solve new problems. It also makes it easier to understand your solutions to old problems when you re-read your old code.
In later chapters you'll learn how to apply these ideas when modelling. You can often use multiple simple models to help understand a complex dataset, or you might have multiple models because you're bootstrapping or cross-validating. The techniques you'll learn in this chapter will be invaluable.
It's easy to get confused between `[` and `[[`, but it's important to understand the difference. A few months ago I stayed at a hotel with a pretty interesting pepper shaker that I hope will help you remember these differences:
The map functions apply a function to every element in a list. They are the most commonly used part of purrr, but not the only part. Since lists are often used to represent complex hierarchies, purrr also provides tools to work with hierarchy:
* You can extract deeply nested elements in a single call by supplying
a character vector to the map functions.
* You can remove a level of the hierarchy with the flatten functions.
Some times you get data structures that are very deeply nested. A common source of such data is JSON from a web API. I've previously downloaded a list of GitHub issues related to this book and saved it as `issues.json`. Now I'm going to load it into a list with jsonlite. By default `fromJSON()` tries to be helpful and simplifies the structure a little for you. Here I'm going to show you how to do it with purrr, so I set `simplifyVector = FALSE`:
You can use the same technique to extract more deeply nested structure. For example, imagine you want to extract the name and id of the user. You could do that in two steps:
As well as indexing deeply into hierarchy, it's sometimes useful to flatten it. That's the job of the flatten family of functions: `flatten()`, `flatten_lgl()`, `flatten_int()`, `flatten_dbl()`, and `flatten_chr()`. In the code below we take a list of lists of double vectors, then flatten it to a list of double vectors, then to a double vector.
Base R has `unlist()`, but I recommend avoiding it for the same reason I recommend avoiding `sapply()`: it always succeeds. Even if your data structure accidentally changes, `unlist()` will continue to work silently the wrong type of output. This tends to create problems that are frustrating to debug.
You'll see an example of this in the next section, as `transpose()` is particularly useful in conjunction with adverbs like `safely()` and `quietly()`.
It's called transpose by analogy to matrices. When you subset a transposed matrix, you switch indices: `x[i, j]` is the same as `t(x)[j, i]`. It's the same idea when transposing a list, but the subsetting looks a little different: `x[[i]][[j]]` is equivalent to `transpose(x)[[j]][[i]]`. Similarly, a transpose is its own inverse so `transpose(transpose(x))` is equal to `x`.
Transpose is also useful when working with JSON APIs. Many JSON APIs represent data frames in a row-based format, rather than R's column-based format. `transpose()` makes it easy to switch between the two:
`is_numeric()` is a __predicate__: a function that returns either `TRUE` or `FALSE`. There are a number of of purrr functions designed to work specifically with predicates:
Each predicate also comes with "scalar" and "bare" versions. The scalar version checks that the length is 1 and the bare version checks that the object is a bare vector with no S3 class.
