Select multiple elements from a list

r list subset
user1357015 picture user1357015 · Aug 25, 2012 · Viewed 121.1k times · Source

I have a list in R some 10,000 elements long. Say I want to select only elements, 5, 7, and 9. I'm not sure how I would do that without a for loop.

I want to do something like mylist[[c(5,7,9]] but that doesn't work. I've also tried the lapply function but haven't been able to get that working either.

Answer

Glen_b picture Glen_b · Aug 25, 2012

mylist[c(5,7,9)] should do it.

You want the sublists returned as sublists of the result list; you don't use [[]] (or rather, the function is [[) for that -- as Dason mentions in comments, [[ grabs the element.

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