Dismantling a List in R, Removing Duplicate Elements

Overview

In R, where one often has to deal with all sorts of unrefined data, the list data type is especially useful for organizing data. On the flip side, however, accessing the data is somewhat cumbersome, and it is disadvantageous for finding the content you want.

In such cases, breaking up the list data type with the unlist() function makes these manipulations much easier.

The unique() function removes all duplicate elements from the given array, leaving only one of each. It can play a role similar to when you would use the set data type in Python.

Code

Below is example code.

x<-list(A=c(3,2,5,3),B=c(2.2,5,3,2.0)); x
unlist(x)
unique(unlist(x))