On Sun, Dec 4, 2022 at 1:22 PM <avi.e.gr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This may be a fairly dumb and often asked question about some functions like > strsplit() that return a list of things, often a list of ONE thing that be > another list or a vector and needs to be made into something simpler.. > > The examples shown below have used various methods to convert the result to a > vector but why is this not a built-in option for such a function to simplify > the result either when possible or always? > > Sure you can subset it with " [[1]]" or use unlist() or as.vector() to coerce > it back to a vector. But when you have a very common idiom and a fact that > many people waste lots of time figuring out they had a LIST containing a > single vector and debug, maybe it would have made sense to have either a > sister function like strsplit_v() that returns what is actually wanted or > allow strsplit(whatever, output="vector") or something giving the same result. > > Yes, I understand that when there is a workaround, it just complicates the > base, but there could be a package that consistently does things like this to > make the use of such functions easier.
The next version of stringr (currently being processed by CRAN) provides str_split_1() for exactly this purpose. Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
