Converting grouped tibble to named list

Question

I feel like there is probably a better way to do this in tidyverse than a for-loop. Start with a standard tibble/dataframe, and make a list where the name of the list elements are the unique values of one column (group_by?) and the list elements are all the values of another column.

  my_data <- tibble(list_names = c("Ford", "Chevy", "Ford", "Dodge", "Dodge", "Ford"),
                    list_values = c("Ranger", "Equinox", "F150", "Caravan", "Ram", "Explorer"))
  
# A tibble: 6 × 2
  list_names list_values
  <chr>      <chr>      
1 Ford       Ranger     
2 Chevy      Equinox    
3 Ford       F150       
4 Dodge      Caravan    
5 Dodge      Ram        
6 Ford       Explorer

This is the desired output:

  desired_output <- list(Ford = c("Ranger", "F150", "Explorer"),
       Chevy = c("Equinox"),
       Dodge = c("Caravan", "Ram"))

$Ford
[1] "Ranger"   "F150"     "Explorer"

$Chevy
[1] "Equinox"

$Dodge
[1] "Caravan" "Ram" 

It can be accomplished with a for-loop but I bet there is a tidyverse function that makes it more simple/faster, etc.

  desired_output <- list()
  for(i in seq_along(my_data$list_names)) {
    entry <- my_data %>%
      filter(list_names == my_data$list_names[i]) %>%
      pull(list_values)
    desired_output[[my_data$list_names[i]]] <- entry
  }

Answer 1

We can use split

with(my_data, split(list_values,
     factor(list_names, levels = unique(list_names))))
$Ford
[1] "Ranger"   "F150"     "Explorer"

$Chevy
[1] "Equinox"

$Dodge
[1] "Caravan" "Ram"   

---

Or with unstack

unstack(my_data, list_values ~ list_names)
$Chevy
[1] "Equinox"

$Dodge
[1] "Caravan" "Ram"    

$Ford
[1] "Ranger"   "F150"     "Explorer"