Speed trick: unlist(…, use.names=FALSE) is heaps faster!
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Sometimes a minor change to your R code can make a big difference in processing time. Here is an example showing that if you’re don’t care about the names attribute when unlist():ing a list, specifying argument use.names=FALSE can speed up the processing lots!Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
> x <- split(sample(1000, size=1e6, rep=TRUE), rep(1:1e5, times=10)) > t1 <- system.time(y1 <- unlist(x)) > t2 <- system.time(y2 <- unlist(x, use.names=FALSE)) > stopifnot(identical(y2, unname(y1))) > t1/t2 user system elapsed 103 NaN 104That’s more than a 100 times speedup.
So, check your code to see to which unlist() statements you can add an use.names=FALSE.
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