In R, what is the difference between the [] and [[]] notations for accessing the elements of a list?

Question

R provides two different methods for accessing the elements of a list or data.frame- the [] and [[]] operators.

What is the difference between the two? In what situations should I use one over the other?

Answer 1

Double brackets accesses a list element, while a single bracket gives you back a list with a single element.

lst <- list('one','two','three')

a <- lst[1]
class(a)
## returns "list"

a <- lst[[1]]
class(a)
## returns "character"

Answer 2

[] extracts a list, [[]] extracts elements within the list

alist <- list(c("a", "b", "c"), c(1,2,3,4), c(8e6, 5.2e9, -9.3e7))

str(alist[[1]])
 chr [1:3] "a" "b" "c"

str(alist[1])
List of 1
 $ : chr [1:3] "a" "b" "c"

str(alist[[1]][1])
 chr "a"

Answer 3

The significant differences between the two methods are the class of the objects they return when used for extraction and whether they may accept a range of values, or just a single value during assignment.

Consider the case of data extraction on the following list:

foo <- list( str='R', vec=c(1,2,3), bool=TRUE )

Say we would like to extract the value stored by bool from foo and use it inside an if() statement. This will illustrate the differences between the return values of [] and [[]] when they are used for data extraction. The [] method returns objects of class list (or data.frame if foo was a data.frame) while the [[]] method returns objects whose class is determined by the type of their values.

So, using the [] method results in the following:

if( foo[ 'bool' ] ){ print("Hi!") }
Error in if (foo["bool"]) { : argument is not interpretable as logical

class( foo[ 'bool' ] )
[1] "list"

This is because the [] method returned a list and a list is not valid object to pass directly into an if() statement. In this case we need to use [[]] because it will return the "bare" object stored in 'bool' which will have the appropriate class:

if( foo[[ 'bool' ]] ){ print("Hi!") }
[1] "Hi!"

class( foo[[ 'bool' ]] )
[1] "logical"

The second difference is that the [] operator may be used to access a range of slots in a list or columns in a data frame while the [[]] operator is limited to accessing a single slot or column. Consider the case of value assignment using a second list, bar():

bar <- list( mat=matrix(0,nrow=2,ncol=2), rand=rnorm(1) )

Say we want to overwrite the last two slots of foo with the data contained in bar. If we try to use the [[]] operator, this is what happens:

foo[[ 2:3 ]] <- bar
Error in foo[[2:3]] <- bar : 
more elements supplied than there are to replace

This is because [[]] is limited to accessing a single element. We need to use []:

foo[ 2:3 ] <- bar
print( foo )

$str
[1] "R"

$vec
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    0    0
[2,]    0    0

$bool
[1] -0.6291121

Note that while the assignment was successful, the slots in foo kept their original names.

Answer 4

Never use single bracket [ ] indexing for a list. It's almost always a bug when you do it.

This really is a language misfeature.

Answer 5

But dude(!) you can extract a new list composed of multiple elements from a list with [ via name or index - that really is an awesome feature since it provides vector indexing for collections of arbitrary objects.