Perhaps the following does what you want. It extends each element of your list to a common length, converts that to a matrix, then to a data.frame:
f <- function(data) { nCol <- max(vapply(data, length, 0)) data <- lapply(data, function(row) c(row, rep(NA, nCol-length(row)))) data <- matrix(unlist(data), nrow=length(data), ncol=nCol, byrow=TRUE) data.frame(data) } E.g., > rawData <- list(c(1,2,3), c(11,12), integer(), 31) > f(rawData) X1 X2 X3 1 1 2 3 2 11 12 NA 3 NA NA NA 4 31 NA NA What sort of data is this? If it is longitudinal it might be more straigtforward to store it as a three-column data.frame (columns "subject", "time", "value"). Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On > Behalf Of Chris Conner > Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 11:41 AM > To: HelpR > Subject: [R] turning a list of vectors into a data.frame (as rows of the DF)? > > As a newer R practicioner, it seems I stump myself weekly (at least) with > issues that have spinning my > wheels. Here is yet another... I'm trying to turn a list of numeric vectors > (of uneual length) inot a > dataframe. Each vector held in the list represents a row, and there are some > rows of unequal > length. I would like NAs as placeholders for "missing" data in the shorter > vectors. I think I'm > missing something quite basic. > > v1 <- c(1,2,3,4) > v2 <- c(1,2) > lst1 <- list(v1,v2) > > Of course there is the intuitive: > > as.data.frame(lst1) > > However, the recycling rule (expectedly) reclycles 1,2 versus using NAs as > placeholders. > > Then, looking into Teetor's R Cookbook, there is a piece of code that looked > (from the description) > like it might do the trick: > > do.call(rbind, Map(as.data.frame,lst1) > > But I get the error: > Error in match.names(clabs, names(xi)) : > names do not match previous names > > Thinking the source of the error had to do with the vectors of unequal > lenght, I tried Hadley's > rbind.fill thusly: > > library(reshape) > do.call(rbind.fill, Map(as.data.frame,lst1) > > Which produced a dataset, but gain, not in the desired format. > > Thanks in advance to anyone that can bring my frustrations to end! > C > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.