Union of intersecting vectors in a list in R

Question

I have a list of vectors as follows.

data <- list(v1=c(\"a\", \"b\", \"c\"), v2=c(\"g\", \"h\", \"k\"), 
             v3=c(\"c\", \"d\"), v4=c(\"n\", \"a\         


        

Answer 1

This is kind of like a graph problem so I like to use the igraph library for this, using your sample data, you can do

library(igraph)
#build edgelist
el <- do.call("rbind",lapply(data, embed, 2))
#make a graph
gg <- graph.edgelist(el, directed=F)
#partition the graph into disjoint sets
split(V(gg)$name, clusters(gg)$membership)

# $`1`
# [1] "b" "a" "c" "d" "n"
# 
# $`2`
# [1] "h" "g" "k" "i"

And we can view the results with

V(gg)$color=c("green","purple")[clusters(gg)$membership]
plot(gg)