Merge Two Lists in R

Question

I have two lists

first = list(a = 1, b = 2, c = 3)
second = list(a = 2, b = 3, c = 4)

I want to merge these two lists so the final product

Answer 1

Here's some code that I ended up writing, based upon @Andrei's answer but without the elegancy/simplicity. The advantage is that it allows a more complex recursive merge and also differs between elements that should be connected with rbind and those that are just connected with c:

# Decided to move this outside the mapply, not sure this is 
# that important for speed but I imagine redefining the function
# might be somewhat time-consuming
mergeLists_internal <- function(o_element, n_element){
  if (is.list(n_element)){
    # Fill in non-existant element with NA elements
    if (length(n_element) != length(o_element)){
      n_unique <- names(n_element)[! names(n_element) %in% names(o_element)]
      if (length(n_unique) > 0){
        for (n in n_unique){
          if (is.matrix(n_element[[n]])){
            o_element[[n]] <- matrix(NA, 
                                     nrow=nrow(n_element[[n]]), 
                                     ncol=ncol(n_element[[n]]))
          }else{
            o_element[[n]] <- rep(NA, 
                                  times=length(n_element[[n]]))
          }
        }
      }

      o_unique <- names(o_element)[! names(o_element) %in% names(n_element)]
      if (length(o_unique) > 0){
        for (n in o_unique){
          if (is.matrix(n_element[[n]])){
            n_element[[n]] <- matrix(NA, 
                                     nrow=nrow(o_element[[n]]), 
                                     ncol=ncol(o_element[[n]]))
          }else{
            n_element[[n]] <- rep(NA, 
                                  times=length(o_element[[n]]))
          }
        }
      }
    }  

    # Now merge the two lists
    return(mergeLists(o_element, 
                      n_element))

  }
  if(length(n_element)>1){
    new_cols <- ifelse(is.matrix(n_element), ncol(n_element), length(n_element))
    old_cols <- ifelse(is.matrix(o_element), ncol(o_element), length(o_element))
    if (new_cols != old_cols)
      stop("Your length doesn't match on the elements,",
           " new element (", new_cols , ") !=",
           " old element (", old_cols , ")")
  }

  return(rbind(o_element, 
               n_element, 
               deparse.level=0))
  return(c(o_element, 
           n_element))
}
mergeLists <- function(old, new){
  if (is.null(old))
    return (new)

  m <- mapply(mergeLists_internal, old, new, SIMPLIFY=FALSE)
  return(m)
}

Here's my example:

v1 <- list("a"=c(1,2), b="test 1", sublist=list(one=20:21, two=21:22))
v2 <- list("a"=c(3,4), b="test 2", sublist=list(one=10:11, two=11:12, three=1:2))
mergeLists(v1, v2)

This results in:

$a
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    1    2
[2,]    3    4

$b
[1] "test 1" "test 2"

$sublist
$sublist$one
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]   20   21
[2,]   10   11

$sublist$two
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]   21   22
[2,]   11   12

$sublist$three
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]   NA   NA
[2,]    1    2

Yeah, I know - perhaps not the most logical merge but I have a complex parallel loop that I had to generate a more customized .combine function for, and therefore I wrote this monster :-)