Remove NULL elements from list of lists

Question

How do I remove the null elements from a list of lists, like below, in R:

lll <- list(list(NULL),list(1),list(\"a\"))

The object I want

Answer 1

Since you have lists in lists, you probably need to run l/sapply twice, like:

lll[!sapply(lll,sapply,is.null)]

#[[1]]
#[[1]][[1]]
#[1] 1
#
#
#[[2]]
#[[2]][[1]]
#[1] "a"

Answer 2

There is a new package rlist on CRAN, thanks to Kun Ren for making our life easier.

    list.clean(.data, fun = is.null, recursive = FALSE)

or for recursive removal of NULL:

    list.clean(.data, fun = is.null, recursive = TRUE)

Answer 3

For this particular example you can also use unlist with its recursive argument.

lll[!sapply(unlist(lll, recursive=FALSE), is.null)]
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
#
#
# [[2]]
# [[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"

Answer 4

Here's an option using Filter and Negate combination

Filter(Negate(function(x) is.null(unlist(x))), lll)
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
#
#
# [[2]]
# [[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"

Answer 5

Quick fix on Josh O'Brien's solution. There's a bit of an issue with lists of functions

is.NullOb <- function(x) if(!(is.function(x))) is.null(x) | all(sapply(x, is.null)) else FALSE

## Recursively step down into list, removing all such objects 
rmNullObs <- function(x) {
  if(!(is.function(x))) {
    x = x[!(sapply(x, is.NullOb))]
    lapply(x, function(x) if (is.list(x)) rmNullObs(x) else x)
  }
}

Answer 6

This recursive solution has the virtue of working on even more deeply nested lists.

It's closely modeled on Gabor Grothendieck's answer to this quite similar question. My modification of that code is needed if the function is to also remove objects like list(NULL) (not the same as NULL), as you are wanting.

## A helper function that tests whether an object is either NULL _or_ 
## a list of NULLs
is.NullOb <- function(x) is.null(x) | all(sapply(x, is.null))

## Recursively step down into list, removing all such objects 
rmNullObs <- function(x) {
   x <- Filter(Negate(is.NullOb), x)
   lapply(x, function(x) if (is.list(x)) rmNullObs(x) else x)
}

rmNullObs(lll)
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
# 
# 
# [[2]]
# [[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"

Here is an example of its application to a more deeply nested list, on which the other currently proposed solutions variously fail.

LLLL <- list(lll)
rmNullObs(LLLL)
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [[1]][[1]][[1]]
# [[1]][[1]][[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
# 
# 
# [[1]][[1]][[2]]
# [[1]][[1]][[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"