R Cookbook

Chapter 5. Data Structures

Introduction

You can get pretty far in R just using vectors. That’s what Chapter 2 is all about. This chapter moves beyond vectors to recipes for matrices, lists, factors, and data frames. If you have preconceptions about data structures, I suggest you put them aside. R does data structures differently.

If you want to study the technical aspects of R’s data structures, I suggest reading R in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) and the R Language Definition. My notes here are more informal. These are things I wish I’d known when I started using R.

Vectors

Here are some key properties of vectors:

Vectors are homogeneous

All elements of a vector must have the same type or, in R terminology, the same mode.

Vectors can be indexed by position

So v[2] refers to the second element of v.

Vectors can be indexed by multiple positions, returning a subvector

So v[c(2,3)] is a subvector of v that consists of the second and third elements.

Vector elements can have names

Vectors have a names property, the same length as the vector itself, that gives names to the elements:

> v <- c(10, 20, 30)
> names(v) <- c("Moe", "Larry", "Curly")
> print(v)
  Moe Larry Curly 
   10    20    30

If vector elements have names then you can select them by name

Continuing the previous example:

> v["Larry"]
Larry 
   20

Lists

Lists are heterogeneous

Lists can contain elements of different types; in R terminology, list elements may have different modes. Lists can even contain other structured objects, such as lists and data frames; this ...