Will vapply work with data classes beyond numeric, character, and logical? Can vapply return as.Date data in the original class? Here's my list:
name <- "Truman"
birth <- as.Date("1884/05/08")
death <- as.Date("1972/12/26")
no33 <- list("name"=name"birth"=birth,"death"=death)
name <- "Eisenhower"
birth <- as.Date("1890/10/14")
death <- as.Date("1969/03/28")
no34 <- list("name"=name"birth"=birth,"death"=death)
presidents <- list(no33,no34)
lapply works fine, but sapply transforms the dates:
lapply(1:length(presidents), FUN= function (x) presidents[[x]]$death)
sapply(1:length(presidents), FUN= function (x) presidents[[x]]$death)
vapply throws an error when specifying Date as data type:
vapply(1:length(presidents), FUN= function (x)
as.character(presidents[[x]]$death), FUN.VALUE = date(1)))
I've got this one line work around
as.Date(vapply(1:length(presidents), FUN= function (x)
as.character(presidents[[x]]$death), FUN.VALUE =
character(1)))
What is sapply doing? And is there a better alternative to my one-line hack?
