On 04/12/2022 10:25, Hadley Wickham wrote:
On Sun, Dec 4, 2022 at 1:22 PM <avi.e.gr...@gmail.com> wrote:
This may be a fairly dumb and often asked question about some functions like
strsplit() that return a list of things, often a list of ONE thing that be
another list or a vector and needs to be made into something simpler..
The examples shown below have used various methods to convert the result to a
vector but why is this not a built-in option for such a function to simplify
the result either when possible or always?
Sure you can subset it with " [[1]]" or use unlist() or as.vector() to coerce it back to
a vector. But when you have a very common idiom and a fact that many people waste lots of time
figuring out they had a LIST containing a single vector and debug, maybe it would have made sense
to have either a sister function like strsplit_v() that returns what is actually wanted or allow
strsplit(whatever, output="vector") or something giving the same result.
Yes, I understand that when there is a workaround, it just complicates the
base, but there could be a package that consistently does things like this to
make the use of such functions easier.
The next version of stringr (currently being processed by CRAN)
provides str_split_1() for exactly this purpose.
Thanks!
Well appreciated...
Hadley
--
Micha Silver
Ben Gurion Univ.
Sde Boker, Remote Sensing Lab
cell: +972-523-665918
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