How to group a vector into a list of vectors?

Question

I have some data which looks like this (fake data for example\'s sake):

dressId        color 
6              yellow 
9              red
10             green         


        

Answer 1

split.data.frame is a good way to organize this; then extract the color component.

d <- data.frame(dressId=c(6,9,10,10,10,12,12),
               color=factor(c("yellow","red","green",
                              "purple","yellow",
                              "purple","red"),
                 levels=c("red","orange","yellow",
                          "green","blue","purple")))

I think the version you want is actually this:

ss <- split.data.frame(d,d$dressId)

You can get something more like the list you requested by extracting the color component:

lapply(ss,"[[","color")