R: How to export structured list in excel

Question

It should be very simple, but my efforts with unlist or matrix failed.

How can you export the following list to an excel sheet that retains the same structure?

 list(structure(list(rob = c(0.500395231401348, 0.839314035292317, 0.710466394967634, 0.61574235723249)), .Names = "rob", row.names = c(NA, 4L), class = "data.frame"), structure(list(rob = c(0.66163340478379, 0.591092739290417, 0.554484883310407, 0.78199375944331, 0.489388775242085 )), .Names = "rob", row.names = c(NA, 5L), class = "data.frame"), structure(list(rob = c(0.697897964659196, 0.480394119894312, 0.514294379103359, 0.626971885076273, 0.77938643423231, 0.618135503224601 )), .Names = "rob", row.names = c(NA, 6L), class = "data.frame")) 

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can do it:

• Filling each vector with NA to make all vectors of the same length
• Using do.call(rbind, ...) to create a data frame

Like this:

 xx <- lapply(x, unlist) max <- max(sapply(xx, length)) do.call(rbind, lapply(xx, function(z)c(z, rep(NA, max-length(z))))) rob1 rob2 rob3 rob4 [1,] 0.5003952 0.8393140 0.7104664 0.6157424 NA NA [2,] 0.6616334 0.5910927 0.5544849 0.7819938 0.4893888 NA [3,] 0.6978980 0.4803941 0.5142944 0.6269719 0.7793864 0.6181355 

This is then an easy way to use write.table() or your favorite export to an excel method.