How to Convert List to Numeric in R

To convert a list to a numeric value in R, you can combine the unlist() function and the as.numeric() function.

The unlist() function produces a vector that contains all the atomic components, and the as.numeric() returns a numeric value or converts any value to a numeric value.

Syntax

as.numeric(unlist(data))

Parameters

Example

Here are the two vectors.

rv1 <- 1:5
rv2 <- 6:10

Use the list() function to create a vector list.

rv1 <- 1:5
rv2 <- 6:10

data <- list(rv1, rv2)

data

# Output:

# [[1]]
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5

# [[2]]
# [1] 6 7 8 9 10

Finally, use the unlist() and as.numeric() functions.

rv1 <- 1:5
rv2 <- 6:10

data <- list(rv1, rv2)

num <- as.numeric(unlist(data))

num

# Output: [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

You can see that the final output is a numeric value, and to check its data type, use the typeof() function.

typeof(num)

It will give us the double as an output, meaning it’s a numeric value. The numeric data type is identical to double (and real ). It creates a double-precision vector of the specified length, with each element equal to 0.

If the values are of type factor, you should convert them using the following code snippet.

as.numeric(as.character(unlist(data)))

That’s it.