[Rd] undocumented name mangling during unlist?

Seth Falcon sfalcon at fhcrc.org
Mon Jan 8 19:04:27 CET 2007


The documentation for unlist says:

     By default, 'unlist' tries to retain the naming information
     present in 'x'.  If 'use.names = FALSE' all naming information is
     dropped.

Hence, I find it odd that I see the following:

    > b <- list("highway1"=1:5)
    > unlist(b)
    highway11 highway12 highway13 highway14 highway15 
            1         2         3         4         5 

I suspect this is essential behavior for something or other, but it
seems that this approach is inefficient for large lists and in many
contexts does not preserve names, but invents new ones.

/me ducks

+ seth



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