In general, most of the objects you would interact with as a user would tend to be a vector; e.g numeric vector, logical vector. These objects can only take in a single type of variable (a numeric vector can only have numbers inside it).

A list would be able to store any type variable in it, making it to the generic object that can store any type of variables we would need.

Example of initializing a list

exampleList1 <- list('a', 'b')
exampleList2 <- list(1, 2)
exampleList3 <- list('a', 1, 2)

In order to understand the data that was defined in the list, we can use the str function.

str(exampleList1)
str(exampleList2)
str(exampleList3)

Subsetting of lists distinguishes between extracting a slice of the list, i.e. obtaining a list containing a subset of the elements in the original list, and extracting a single element. Using the [ operator commonly used for vectors produces a new list.

# Returns List
exampleList3[1]
exampleList3[1:2]

To obtain a single element use [[ instead.

# Returns Character
exampleList3[[1]]

List entries may be named:

exampleList4 <- list(
    num = 1:3,
    numeric = 0.5,
    char = c('a', 'b')
)

The entries in named lists can be accessed by their name instead of their index.

exampleList4[['char']]

Alternatively the $ operator can be used to access named elements.

exampleList4$num

This has the advantage that it is faster to type and may be easier to read but it is important to be aware of a potential pitfall. The $ operator uses partial matching to identify matching list elements and may produce unexpected results.

exampleList5 <- exampleList4[2:3]

exampleList4$num
# c(1, 2, 3)

exampleList5$num
# 0.5

exampleList5[['num']]
# NULL

Lists can be particularly useful because they can store objects of different lengths and of various classes.

## Numeric vector
exampleVector1 <- c(12, 13, 14)
## Character vector
exampleVector2 <- c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f")
## Matrix
exampleMatrix1 <- matrix(rnorm(4), ncol = 2, nrow = 2)
## List
exampleList3 <- list('a', 1, 2)

exampleList6 <- list(
    num = exampleVector1, 
    char = exampleVector2,
    mat = exampleMatrix1, 
    list = exampleList3
)
exampleList6
#$num
#[1] 12 13 14
#
#$char
#[1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f"
#
#$mat
#          [,1]        [,2]
#[1,] 0.5013050 -1.88801542
#[2,] 0.4295266  0.09751379
#
#$list
#$list[[1]]
#[1] "a"
#
#$list[[2]]
#[1] 1
#
#$list[[3]]
#[1] 2