> On Sep 14, 2016, at 8:01 AM, Alaios via R-help <r-help@r-project.org> wrote: > > Hi all,I have seen data.frames and operations from the mutate package getting > really popular. In the last years I have been using extensively lists, is > there any reason to not use lists and use other data types for data > manipulation and storage? > Any article that describe their differences? I would like to thank you for > your replyRegardsAlex
Hi, Presuming that you are referring to the mutate() **function**, which is in the dplyr package on CRAN, that package provides a variety of functions to manipulate data in R. Data frames **are** lists with a data.frame class attribute, but with the proviso that each column in the data frame, which is a list element, has the same length, but like a list, may have different data types (e.g. character, numeric, etc.). Thus, a data frame is effectively a rectangular data structure, conceptually in the same manner as an Excel worksheet. A list, which is a more generic data structure, can contain list elements of variable lengths and data types. You might want to begin by reviewing: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html#Lists-and-data-frames which is a section on lists and data frames in the Introduction To R Manual. It would be surprising, to me at least, that you have been using R for several years and have not come across data frames, since they are used in many typical operations, including regression models and the like. Regards, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ 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.
