Split a vector into chunks

Question

I have to split a vector into n chunks of equal size in R. I couldn\'t find any base function to do that. Also Google didn\'t get me anywhere. Here is what I came up with so

Answer 1

Credit to @Sebastian for this function

chunk <- function(x,y){
         split(x, factor(sort(rank(row.names(x))%%y)))
         }

Answer 2

simplified version...
n = 3
split(x, sort(x%%n))

Answer 3

Using base R's rep_len:

x <- 1:10
n <- 3

split(x, rep_len(1:n, length(x)))
# $`1`
# [1]  1  4  7 10
# 
# $`2`
# [1] 2 5 8
# 
# $`3`
# [1] 3 6 9

And as already mentioned if you want sorted indices, simply:

split(x, sort(rep_len(1:n, length(x))))
# $`1`
# [1] 1 2 3 4
# 
# $`2`
# [1] 5 6 7
# 
# $`3`
# [1]  8  9 10

Answer 4

Yet another possibility is the splitIndices function from package parallel:

library(parallel)
splitIndices(20, 3)

Gives:

[[1]]
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

[[2]]
[1]  8  9 10 11 12 13

[[3]]
[1] 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Answer 5

A one-liner splitting d into chunks of size 20:

split(d, ceiling(seq_along(d)/20))

More details: I think all you need is seq_along(), split() and ceiling():

> d <- rpois(73,5)
> d
 [1]  3  1 11  4  1  2  3  2  4 10 10  2  7  4  6  6  2  1  1  2  3  8  3 10  7  4
[27]  3  4  4  1  1  7  2  4  6  0  5  7  4  6  8  4  7 12  4  6  8  4  2  7  6  5
[53]  4  5  4  5  5  8  7  7  7  6  2  4  3  3  8 11  6  6  1  8  4
> max <- 20
> x <- seq_along(d)
> d1 <- split(d, ceiling(x/max))
> d1
$`1`
 [1]  3  1 11  4  1  2  3  2  4 10 10  2  7  4  6  6  2  1  1  2

$`2`
 [1]  3  8  3 10  7  4  3  4  4  1  1  7  2  4  6  0  5  7  4  6

$`3`
 [1]  8  4  7 12  4  6  8  4  2  7  6  5  4  5  4  5  5  8  7  7

$`4`
 [1]  7  6  2  4  3  3  8 11  6  6  1  8  4

Answer 6

I have come up with this solution:

require(magrittr)
create.chunks <- function(x, elements.per.chunk){
    # plain R version
    # split(x, rep(seq_along(x), each = elements.per.chunk)[seq_along(x)])
    # magrittr version - because that's what people use now
    x %>% seq_along %>% rep(., each = elements.per.chunk) %>% extract(seq_along(x)) %>% split(x, .) 
}
create.chunks(letters[1:10], 3)
$`1`
[1] "a" "b" "c"

$`2`
[1] "d" "e" "f"

$`3`
[1] "g" "h" "i"

$`4`
[1] "j"

The key is to use the seq(each = chunk.size) parameter so make it work. Using seq_along acts like rank(x) in my previous solution, but is actually able to produce the correct result with duplicated entries.