From Tidy Data To A Named List in R

Cruel world sometimes forces you to use lists instead of simple tables. Here’s a small snippet for grabbing names and values from a dataframe and combining them into a named list. Each name in the list has one or more values.

library(tidyverse)

pivot_to_list <- function(data, names_from, values_from) {

  nested_data <- data %>%
    select(names = {{ names_from }}, values = {{ values_from }}) %>%
    tidyr::nest(values = values)

  list_names <- nested_data %>% 
    pull("names")

  list_values <- nested_data %>% 
    pull("values") %>%
    purrr::map(pull, "values")

  named_list <- magrittr::set_names(list_values, list_names)
  
  return(named_list)

}