R Select multiple items from the list.

Question

I have a list in R of approximately 10,000 items. Say I want to select only elements 5, 7, and 9. I'm not sure how to do this without a for loop.

I want to do something like mylist[[c(5,7,9]] , but that will not work. I also tried the lapply function, but could not get this to work.

Answer 1

mylist[c(5,7,9)] should do this.

You want the sublists to be returned as lists of a list of results; you do not use [[]] (or rather, the [[ ) function for this - as Dason notes in the comments, [[ captures the element.