Best way to store variable-length data in an R data.frame?

Question

I have some mixed-type data that I would like to store in an R data structure of some sort. Each data point has a set of fixed attributes which may be 1-d numeric, factors, or

Answer 1

Another option would be to convert your data frame into a matrix of mode list - each element of the matrix would be a list. standard array operations (slicing with [, apply(), etc. would be applicable).

> d <- data.frame(id=c(1,2,3), num_tokens=c(2,1,4), token_lengths=as.array(list(c(5,5), 9, c(4,2,2,4,6))))
> m <- as.matrix(d)
> mode(m)
[1] "list"
> m[,"token_lengths"]
[[1]]
[1] 5 5

[[2]]
[1] 9

[[3]]
[1] 4 2 2 4 6

> m[3,]
$id
[1] 3

$num_tokens
[1] 4

$token_lengths
[1] 4 2 2 4 6