I am not happy with the accepted answer to Append an object to a list in R in amortized constant time?
> list1 <- list("foo", pi)
> bar <- list("A", "B")
How can I append new element bar
to list1
? Clearly, c()
does not work, it flattens bar
:
> c(list1, bar)
[[1]]
[1] "foo"
[[2]]
[1] 3.141593
[[3]]
[1] "A"
[[4]]
[1] "B"
Assignment to index works:
> list1[[length(list1)+1]] <- bar
> list1
[[1]]
[1] "foo"
[[2]]
[1] 3.141593
[[3]]
[[3]][[1]]
[1] "A"
[[3]][[2]]
[1] "B"
What is the efficiency of this method? Is there a more elegant way?
Adding elements to a list is very slow when doing it one element at a time. See these two examples:
I'm keeping the Result
variable in the global environment to avoid copies to evaluation frames and telling R where to look for it with .GlobalEnv$
, to avoid a blind search with <<-
:
Result <- list()
AddItemNaive <- function(item)
{
.GlobalEnv$Result[[length(.GlobalEnv$Result)+1]] <- item
}
system.time(for(i in seq_len(2e4)) AddItemNaive(i))
# user system elapsed
# 15.60 0.00 15.61
Slow. Now let's try the second approach:
Result <- list()
AddItemNaive2 <- function(item)
{
.GlobalEnv$Result <- c(.GlobalEnv$Result, item)
}
system.time(for(i in seq_len(2e4)) AddItemNaive2(i))
# user system elapsed
# 13.85 0.00 13.89
Still slow.
Now let's try using an environment
, and creating new variables within this environment instead of adding elements to a list. The issue here is that variables must be named, so I'll use the counter as a string to name each item "slot":
Counter <- 0
Result <- new.env()
AddItemEnvir <- function(item)
{
.GlobalEnv$Counter <- .GlobalEnv$Counter + 1
.GlobalEnv$Result[[as.character(.GlobalEnv$Counter)]] <- item
}
system.time(for(i in seq_len(2e4)) AddItemEnvir(i))
# user system elapsed
# 0.36 0.00 0.38
Whoa much faster. :-) It may be a little awkward to work with, but it works.
A final approach uses a list, but instead of augmenting its size one element at a time, it doubles the size each time the list is full. The list size is also kept in a dedicated variable, to avoid any slowdown using length
:
Counter <- 0
Result <- list(NULL)
Size <- 1
AddItemDoubling <- function(item)
{
if( .GlobalEnv$Counter == .GlobalEnv$Size )
{
length(.GlobalEnv$Result) <- .GlobalEnv$Size <- .GlobalEnv$Size * 2
}
.GlobalEnv$Counter <- .GlobalEnv$Counter + 1
.GlobalEnv$Result[[.GlobalEnv$Counter]] <- item
}
system.time(for(i in seq_len(2e4)) AddItemDoubling(i))
# user system elapsed
# 0.22 0.00 0.22
It's even faster. And as easy to a work as any list.
Let's try these last two solutions with more iterations:
Counter <- 0
Result <- new.env()
system.time(for(i in seq_len(1e5)) AddItemEnvir(i))
# user system elapsed
# 27.72 0.06 27.83
Counter <- 0
Result <- list(NULL)
Size <- 1
system.time(for(i in seq_len(1e5)) AddItemDoubling(i))
# user system elapsed
# 9.26 0.00 9.32
Well, the last one is definetely the way to go.