plot list structure in R

Question

I work more and more with highly nested lists such as:

mynestedlist<-list(list(LETTERS,month.name),list(list(seq(1,100,5),1,1),seq(1,100,5),seq(1,100,5)))

and sometimes I struggle to understand the structure of the list I am working on. I was wondering if there is any way to display the hierarchical structure of a list, using dendrogram-like graphs maybe.

I know I can use str to print the structure of a list:

str(mynestedlist,max.level=1)

However, a graphical way to display lists would be more useful!

Answer 1

You may check the data.tree package. It allows to print nested list pretty nicely and it doesn't need you to write complicated function. Here is an example:

library(data.tree)
> dt <- FromListSimple(mynestedlist)
> dt
  levelName
1 Root     
2  ¦--1    
3  °--2    
4      °--1

This allows you to check at the level of list, and you can combine this with str to get a full picture of your list structure.