How to build a list of vectors of different lengths?

Question

I have a list of 9 different vectors inside. And I want to draw them (points) on the same figure with different colors by their names. How to do it in the R language?

Answer 1

Using the above example:

# example data: dat <- list(a=1:5,b=2:7,c=3:10) # get plotting: plot(unlist(dat),type="n",xlim=c(1,max(sapply(dat,length)))) mapply(lines,dat,col=seq_along(dat),lty=2) legend("topleft",names(dat),lty=2,col=seq_along(dat)) 

Answer 2

No question would be complete without ggplot's answer.

 dat <- list(a=1:5,b=2:7,c=3:10) dat <- lapply(dat, function(x) cbind(x = seq_along(x), y = x)) list.names <- names(dat) lns <- sapply(dat, nrow) dat <- as.data.frame(do.call("rbind", dat)) dat$group <- rep(list.names, lns) library(ggplot2) ggplot(dat, aes(x = x, y = y, colour = group)) + theme_bw() + geom_line(linetype = "dotted") 

To build each row in a separate section, use

 ggplot(dat, aes(x = x, y = y, colour = group)) + theme_bw() + geom_line(linetype = "dotted") + facet_wrap(~ group)