Converting nested list to dataframe

Question

The goal is to convert a nested list which sometimes contain missing records into a data frame. An example of the structure when there are missing records is:

Answer 1

You could create a list of data.frames:

dfs <- lapply(mylist, data.frame, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

Then use one of these:

library(plyr)
rbind.fill(dfs)

or the faster

library(dplyr)
rbind_all(dfs)

In the case of dplyr::rbind_all, I am surprised that it chooses to use "" instead of NA for missing data. If you remove stringsAsFactors = FALSE, you will get NA but at the cost of a warning... So suppressWarnings(rbind_all(lapply(mylist, data.frame))) would be an ugly but fast solution.