How to unlist and paste without the column ID

[mshakhs]

Hi
I am new in r. Just one year learner.
I have created a list of patient id's with their diagnosis. I want to transform the resulted list to just a list of diagnosis for each patient separated by a comma, without the patient_sk. This is my code; I just think that I should use unlist and paste. Any ideas?

[mfherman]

Hi!

To help us help you, could you please prepare a reproducible example (reprex) illustrating your issue? Please have a look at this guide, to see how to create one:

FAQ: How to do a minimal reproducible example ( reprex ) for beginners

A minimal reproducible example consists of the following items: A minimal dataset, necessary to reproduce the issue The minimal runnable code necessary to reproduce the issue, which can be run on the given dataset, and including the necessary information on the used packages. Let's quickly go over each one of these with examples: Minimal Dataset (Sample Data) You need to provide a data frame that is small enough to be (reasonably) pasted on a post, but big enough to reproduce your issue. Let's say, as an example, that you are working with the iris data frame head(iris) #> Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species #> 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.…

[mshakhs]

Ok, Thank you I will try.
It was so difficult to produce this code already. I will try to find a similar reproducible dataset.

[mfherman]

To demonstrate your problem, it probably doesn't need to be real dataset, often you can just make up some fake data that fits the pattern in your real data. From your description of the data, it sounds like you might have something like this:

data <- replicate(6, sample(letters, 3), simplify = FALSE)
names(data) <- paste0("id_", 1:6)

data
#> $id_1
#> [1] "r" "j" "z"
#> 
#> $id_2
#> [1] "r" "n" "w"
#> 
#> $id_3
#> [1] "k" "x" "z"
#> 
#> $id_4
#> [1] "j" "c" "b"
#> 
#> $id_5
#> [1] "b" "y" "v"
#> 
#> $id_6
#> [1] "d" "w" "m"

I'm not clear on your expected output but if you want to collapse each vector of diagnoses into a single comma separate character, you can do this:

lapply(data, paste, collapse = ", ")
#> $id_1
#> [1] "r, j, z"
#> 
#> $id_2
#> [1] "r, n, w"
#> 
#> $id_3
#> [1] "k, x, z"
#> 
#> $id_4
#> [1] "j, c, b"
#> 
#> $id_5
#> [1] "b, y, v"
#> 
#> $id_6
#> [1] "d, w, m"

^{Created on 2020-01-29 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[mshakhs]

I want it without the $id_1 to appear, only [1] "r, j,z" and so on...

#> [1] "r, j, z"
#> [1] "r, n, w"
#> [1] "k, x, z"
#> [1] "j, c, b"
#> [1] "b, y, v"
#> [1] "d, w, m"

[mfherman]

What type of object do you want to return? If it's just an unnamed list, you can do this:

data <- replicate(6, sample(letters, 3), simplify = FALSE)
names(data) <- paste0("id_", 1:6)

new_data <- lapply(data, paste, collapse = ", ")
names(new_data) <- NULL

new_data
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "m, a, h"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "j, f, g"
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "v, x, b"
#> 
#> [[4]]
#> [1] "m, z, v"
#> 
#> [[5]]
#> [1] "y, f, d"
#> 
#> [[6]]
#> [1] "b, d, s"

^{Created on 2020-01-29 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[mshakhs]

Yes! that works, thank you. I wanted an unnamed list exactly. I just did not know the terminology.