find neighbouring elements of a matrix in R

Question

Edit: huge thanks to the users below for great contributions and to Gregor for benchmarking.

Say I have a matrix filled with integer values like this...

Answer 1

Perhaps you may be able to use a distance function here using the row and column indices of the matrix elements.

# data
(mat <- matrix(16:31, 4, 4))
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,]   16   20   24   28
[2,]   17   21   25   29
[3,]   18   22   26   30
[4,]   19   23   27   31

# find distances between row and column indexes
# interested in values where the distance is one
w <-  which(mat==mat, arr.ind=TRUE)
d <- as.matrix(dist(w, "maximum", diag=TRUE, upper=TRUE))

# extract neighbouring values for each element
# extract where max distance is one
a <- apply(d, 1, function(i) mat[i == 1] )
names(a)  <- mat
a

$`16`
[1] "17" "20" "21"

$`17`
[1] "16" "18" "20" "21" "22"

$`18`
[1] "17" "19" "21" "22" "23
... ....
... ....

Needs tidied, but maybe gives an idea