Suppose I have a list or data frame in R, and I would like to get the row index, how do I do that? That is, I would like to know how many rows a certain matrix consists of.
If i understand your question, you just want to be able to access items in a data frame (or list) by row:
x = matrix( ceiling(9*runif(20)), nrow=5 )
colnames(x) = c("col1", "col2", "col3", "col4")
df = data.frame(x) # create a small data frame
df[1,] # get the first row
df[3,] # get the third row
df[nrow(df),] # get the last row
lf = as.list(df)
lf[[1]] # get first row
lf[[3]] # get third row
etc.