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runique

Finding the unique elements in a list without losing element names

l <- as.list(c(1, 1, 2))
names(l) <- c("a", "b", "c")
unique(l)

I would like to find the unique elements in a list without losing the names of the elements in the list. Any suggestions on how to do this?

Solution

  • There is a bit of conceptual problem, here the unique elements of l are 1 and 2. However, 1 belongs to both "a" and "b", so which name would you want returned for 1? If only the first instance of 1 and the associated name, I would use !duplicated instead of unique as this returns logicals you can use to index l and keep the names

    l[!duplicated(l)]