Chee Hee's approach is both simpler and almost surely more efficient, but I wanted to show another that walks the tree (i.e. the list) directly using recursion at the R level to pull out the desired components. This is in keeping with R's "functional" programming paradigm and avoids the use of regular expressions to extract the desired components from the unlist() version.
extr <- function(x,nm){ if(is.recursive(x)){ wh <- names(x) %in% nm c(x[wh],lapply(x[!wh],extr,nm=nm) ) } else NULL } ## The return value contains a bunch of NULLs; so use unlist() to remove them > unlist(extr(x,"A")) f1.x1.A f1.x2.A f2.x3.A f2.x4.A 11 12 13 14 I would welcome any possibly "slicker" versions of the above. Cheers, Bert Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics (650) 467-7374 "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom." Clifford Stoll On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Chel Hee Lee <chl...@mail.usask.ca> wrote: > This approach may not be fancy as what you are looking for. > >> xl <- unlist(x) >> xl[grep("A", names(xl))] > f1.x1.A f1.x2.A f2.x3.A f2.x4.A > 11 12 13 14 >> > > I hope this helps. > > Chel Hee Lee > > On 01/16/2015 04:40 AM, Rainer M Krug wrote: >> >> Hi >> >> Consider the following variable: >> >> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- >> x1 <- list( >> A = 11, >> B = 21, >> C = 31 >> ) >> >> x2 <- list( >> A = 12, >> B = 22, >> C = 32 >> ) >> >> x3 <- list( >> A = 13, >> B = 23, >> C = 33 >> ) >> >> x4 <- list( >> A = 14, >> B = 24, >> C = 34 >> ) >> >> y1 <- list( >> x1 = x1, >> x2 = x2 >> ) >> >> y2 <- list( >> x3 = x3, >> x4 = x4 >> ) >> >> x <- list( >> f1 = y1, >> f2 = y2 >> ) >> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- >> >> >> To extract all fields named "A" from y1, I can do >> >> ,---- >> | > sapply(y1, "[[", "A") >> | x1 x2 >> | 11 12 >> `---- >> >> But how can I do the same for x? >> >> I could put an sapply into an sapply, but this would be less then >> elegant. >> >> Is there an easier way of doing this? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Rainer >> >> >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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. >> > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.