How to convert a list consisting of vector of different lengths to a usable data frame in R?

I have a (fairly long) list of vectors. The vectors consist of Russian words that I got by using the strsplit() function on sentences.

The following is what head() returns:

[[1]]
[1] "модно"     "создавать" "резюме"    "в"         "виде"     

[[2]]
[1] "ты"        "начианешь" "работать"  "с"         "этими"    

[[3]]
[1] "модно"            "называть"         "блогер-рилейшенз" "―"                "начинается"       "задолго"         

[[4]]
[1] "видел" "по"    "сыну," "что"   "он"   

[[5]]
[1] "четырнадцать," "я"             "поселился"     "на"            "улице"        

[[6]]
[1] "широко"     "продолжали" "род."

Note the vectors are of different length.

What I want is to be able to read the first words from each sentence, the second word, the third, etc.

The desired result would be something like this:

    P1              P2           P3                 P4    P5           P6
[1] "модно"         "создавать"  "резюме"           "в"   "виде"       NA
[2] "ты"            "начианешь"  "работать"         "с"   "этими"      NA
[3] "модно"         "называть"   "блогер-рилейшенз" "―"   "начинается" "задолго"         
[4] "видел"         "по"         "сыну,"            "что" "он"         NA
[5] "четырнадцать," "я"          "поселился"        "на"  "улице"      NA
[6] "широко"        "продолжали" "род."             NA    NA           NA

I have tried to just use data.frame() but that didn't work because the rows are of different length. I also tried rbind.fill() from the plyr package, but that function can only process matrices.

I found some other questions here (that's where I got the plyr help from), but those were all about combining for instance two data frames of different size.

Thanks for your help.

One liner with plyr

plyr::ldply(word.list, rbind)

try this:

word.list <- list(letters[1:4], letters[1:5], letters[1:2], letters[1:6])
n.obs <- sapply(word.list, length)
seq.max <- seq_len(max(n.obs))
mat <- t(sapply(word.list, "[", i = seq.max))

the trick is, that,

c(1:2)[1:4]

returns the vector + two NAs

Another option is stri_list2matrix from library(stringi)

library(stringi)
stri_list2matrix(l, byrow=TRUE)
#    [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
#[1,] "a"  "b"  "c"  NA  
#[2,] "a2" "b2" NA   NA  
#[3,] "a3" "b3" "c3" "d3"

NOTE: Data from @juba's post.

Or as @Valentin mentioned in the comments

sapply(l, "length<-", max(lengths(l)))

You can do something like this :

## Example data
l <- list(c("a","b","c"), c("a2","b2"), c("a3","b3","c3","d3"))
## Compute maximum length
max.length <- max(sapply(l, length))
## Add NA values to list elements
l <- lapply(l, function(v) { c(v, rep(NA, max.length-length(v)))})
## Rbind
do.call(rbind, l)

Which gives :

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,] "a"  "b"  "c"  NA  
[2,] "a2" "b2" NA   NA  
[3,] "a3" "b3" "c3" "d3"

You could also use rbindlist() from the data.table package.

Convert vectors to data.tables or data.frames and transpose them (not sure if this reduces speed a lot) with the help of lapply(). Then bind them with rbindlist() - filling missing cells with NA.

require(data.table)

l = list(c("a","b","c"), c("a2","b2"), c("a3","b3","c3","d3"))
dt = rbindlist(
  lapply(l, function(x) data.table(t(x))),
  fill = TRUE
)

Another option could be to define a function like this (it'd mimic rbind.fill) or use it directly from rowr package:

cbind.fill <- function(...){
  nm <- list(...) 
  nm <- lapply(nm, as.matrix)
  n <- max(sapply(nm, nrow)) 
  do.call(cbind, lapply(nm, function (x) 
    rbind(x, matrix(, n-nrow(x), ncol(x))))) 
}

This response is taken from here (and there're some usage examples).