Working with dictionaries/lists in R

Question

I have trivial question: I couldn\'t find a dictionary data structure in R, so I used list instead (like \"word\"->number) So, right now I have problem how to get the list o

Answer 1

The reason for using dictionaries in the first place is performance. Although it is correct that you can use named vectors and lists for the task the issue is that they are becoming quite slow and memory hungry with more data.

Yet what many people don't know is that R has indeed an inbuilt dictionary data structure: environments with the option hash = TRUE

See the following example for how to make it work:

# vectorize assign, get and exists for convenience
assign_hash <- Vectorize(assign, vectorize.args = c("x", "value"))
get_hash <- Vectorize(get, vectorize.args = "x")
exists_hash <- Vectorize(exists, vectorize.args = "x")

# keys and values
key<- c("tic", "tac", "toe")
value <- c(1, 22, 333)

# initialize hash
hash = new.env(hash = TRUE, parent = emptyenv(), size = 100L)
# assign values to keys
assign_hash(key, value, hash)
## tic tac toe 
##   1  22 333
# get values for keys
get_hash(c("toe", "tic"), hash)
## toe tic 
## 333   1
# alternatively:
mget(c("toe", "tic"), hash)
## $toe
## [1] 333
## 
## $tic
## [1] 1
# show all keys
ls(hash)
## [1] "tac" "tic" "toe"
# show all keys with values
get_hash(ls(hash), hash)
## tac tic toe 
##  22   1 333
# remove key-value pairs
rm(list = c("toe", "tic"), envir = hash)
get_hash(ls(hash), hash)
## tac 
##  22
# check if keys are in hash
exists_hash(c("tac", "nothere"), hash)
##     tac nothere 
##    TRUE   FALSE
# for single keys this is also possible:
# show value for single key
hash[["tac"]]
## [1] 22
# create new key-value pair
hash[["test"]] <- 1234
get_hash(ls(hash), hash)
##  tac test 
##   22 1234
# update single value
hash[["test"]] <- 54321
get_hash(ls(hash), hash)
##   tac  test 
##    22 54321

Edit: On the basis of this answer I wrote a blog post with some more context: http://blog.ephorie.de/hash-me-if-you-can