Remove names from named vector and get only the values

Question

I have a vector like below

tmp <- c(a=1, b=2, c=3)

a b c
1 2 3

I want to flatten this vector to get only 1, 2, 3.

I tried unlist(tmp) but it still gives me the same result.

How to achieve that efficiently?

Answer 1

You just want to remove the names attribute from tmp. There are a number of ways to do that.

You can unname it.

unname(tmp)
# [1] 1 2 3

Or use a very common method for removing names, by setting them to NULL.

names(tmp) <- NULL

Or strip the attributes with as.vector.

as.vector(tmp)
# [1] 1 2 3

Or re-concatenate it without the names.

c(tmp, use.names=FALSE)
# [1] 1 2 3

Or use setNames.

setNames(tmp, NULL)
# [1] 1 2 3

Answer 2

There is a use case that the above does not cover:

tmp <- c(1,2,3)
names(tmp) <- c("a","b","c")

In this case you need to use both:

unlist(unname(tmp))