Access and preserve list names in lapply function

Question

I need to access list names inside the lapply function. I\'ve found some threads online where it\'s said I should iterate through the names of the list to be able to fetch e

Answer 1

imap() from the purrr package is nice for your problem.

library(purrr)
mylist <- list(foo1=1:10,foo2=11:20)
imap(mylist, function(x, y) mean(x)) ## x is the value, y is the name

or you can use a more compact version of imap:

imap(mylist, ~ mean(.x))

Note that you can use variations of imap_xxx depending on the type of vector you want:

imap_dbl(mylist, ~ mean(.x)) ## will return a named numeric vector.