What is the most efficient way to cast a list as a data frame?

Question

Very often I want to convert a list wherein each index has identical element types to a data frame. For example, I may have a list:

> my.list
[[1]]
[[1]]         


        

Answer 1

I think you want:

> do.call(rbind, lapply(my.list, data.frame, stringsAsFactors=FALSE))
  global_stdev_ppb      range   tok global_freq_ppb
1         24267673 0.03114799 hello        211592.6
2         11561448 0.08870838 world       1002043.0
> str(do.call(rbind, lapply(my.list, data.frame, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)))
'data.frame':   2 obs. of  4 variables:
 $ global_stdev_ppb: num  24267673 11561448
 $ range           : num  0.0311 0.0887
 $ tok             : chr  "hello" "world"
 $ global_freq_ppb : num  211593 1002043