Split a vector into chunks

Question

I have to split a vector into n chunks of equal size in R. I couldn\'t find any base function to do that. Also Google didn\'t get me anywhere. Here is what I came up with so

Answer 1

This will split it differently to what you have, but is still quite a nice list structure I think:

chunk.2 <- function(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE, len = length(x), groups = trunc(len/n), overflow = len%%n) { 
  if(force.number.of.groups) {
    f1 <- as.character(sort(rep(1:n, groups)))
    f <- as.character(c(f1, rep(n, overflow)))
  } else {
    f1 <- as.character(sort(rep(1:groups, n)))
    f <- as.character(c(f1, rep("overflow", overflow)))
  }
  
  g <- split(x, f)
  
  if(force.number.of.groups) {
    g.names <- names(g)
    g.names.ordered <- as.character(sort(as.numeric(g.names)))
  } else {
    g.names <- names(g[-length(g)])
    g.names.ordered <- as.character(sort(as.numeric(g.names)))
    g.names.ordered <- c(g.names.ordered, "overflow")
  }
  
  return(g[g.names.ordered])
}

Which will give you the following, depending on how you want it formatted:

> x <- 1:10; n <- 3
> chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = FALSE)
$`1`
[1] 1 2 3

$`2`
[1] 4 5 6

$`3`
[1] 7 8 9

$overflow
[1] 10

> chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE)
$`1`
[1] 1 2 3

$`2`
[1] 4 5 6

$`3`
[1]  7  8  9 10

Running a couple of timings using these settings:

set.seed(42)
x <- rnorm(1:1e7)
n <- 3

Then we have the following results:

> system.time(chunk(x, n)) # your function 
   user  system elapsed 
 29.500   0.620  30.125 

> system.time(chunk.2(x, n, force.number.of.groups = TRUE))
   user  system elapsed 
  5.360   0.300   5.663 

Note: Changing as.factor() to as.character() made my function twice as fast.