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To append two lists into a single list or combine multiple lists in R, you can use either the combine function c() or append() function. In this article, I will explain examples of using these two methods to combine multiple lists in R.

Let’s create the two lists to use, I will define them as list1 and list2.


# Create two lists
list1 = list('sai','ram','deepika','sahithi')
list2 = list('kumar','scott','Don','Lin')

1. R Combine Two Lists using c()

By using combine function c() you can append two lists into a single list in R. This function takes two lists as an argument and returns the combined list. The following example combines the elements from list1 and list2 objects into a single list list3.

Here c() is a combined function from the base package that can be used to combine lists, vectors, and other objects. These base functions are default available with the R installation and automatically loaded to the program.


# Using c()
list3 <- c(list1,list2)
print(list3)

Yields below output.

r append two lists

2. Combine Two Lists using append()

Alternatively, you can also use append() to get two lists into a single list in R. This function also takes two lists as an argument and returns the combined list.


# Using append()
list3 <- append(list1,list2)
print(list3)

Yields the same output as above.

3. Using rlist Package

Package rlist provides a list.append() function to add multiple lists to the list. In order to use this function first, you need to install R package by using install.packages("rlist") and load it using the library("rlist").


# Using list.append()
library('rlist')
list3 <- list.append(list1,list2)
print(list3)

Yields the same output as above.

4. Combine Multiple Lists using append()

Finally by using list.append() let’s combine multiple lists into a single list in R. The below examples combine elements from list1, list2 and anotherList into a single list list3.


# combine multiple lists
library('rlist')
anotherList <- list('A','B')
list3 <- list.append(list1,list2,anotherList)
print(list3)

5. Complete Example

Following is a complete example of appending two lists.


# Create two lists
list1 = list('sai','ram','deepika','sahithi')
list2 = list('kumar','scott','Don','Lin')

# Using c()
list3 <- c(list1,list2)
print(list3)

# Using append()
list3 <- append(list1,list2)
print(list3)

# Using list.append()
library('rlist')
list3 <- list.append(list1,list2)
print(list3)

6. Conclusion

In this article, you have learned how to append two lists into a single list using the R c() combine function and append() function from R base package. And also leveraged using the append() function from rlist package.

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Naveen Nelamali

Naveen Nelamali (NNK) is a Data Engineer with 20+ years of experience in transforming data into actionable insights. Over the years, He has honed his expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining data pipelines with frameworks like Apache Spark, PySpark, Pandas, R, Hive and Machine Learning. Naveen journey in the field of data engineering has been a continuous learning, innovation, and a strong commitment to data integrity. In this blog, he shares his experiences with the data as he come across. Follow Naveen @ LinkedIn and Medium