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

Although this question has long since been answered, it's worth pointing out the data.table package has rbindlist which accomplishes this task very quickly:

library(microbenchmark)
library(data.table)
l <- replicate(1E4, list(a=runif(1), b=runif(1), c=runif(1)), simplify=FALSE)

microbenchmark( times=5,
  R=as.data.frame(Map(f(l), names(l[[1]]))),
  dt=data.frame(rbindlist(l))
)

gives me

Unit: milliseconds
 expr       min        lq    median        uq       max neval
    R 31.060119 31.403943 32.278537 32.370004 33.932700     5
   dt  2.271059  2.273157  2.600976  2.635001  2.729421     5