Replace NaN values in a list with zero (0)

Question

Hi dear I have a problem with NaN. I am working with a large dataset with many variables and they have NaN. The data is like this:

z=list(a=c(1,2,3,NaN,5,8,0,NaN),b=c(NaN,2,3,NaN,5,8,NaN,NaN))

I used this commands to force the list to data frame but I got this:

z=as.data.frame(z)
> is.list(z)
[1] TRUE

> is.data.frame(z)
[1] TRUE
> replace(z,is.nan(z),0) 
Error en is.nan(z) : default method not implemented for type 'list'

I forced z to data frame but it wasn't enough, maybe there is a form to change NaN in list. Thanks for your help. This data is only an example my original data has 36000 observations and 40 variables.

Answer 1

This is a perfect use case for rapply.

> rapply( z, f=function(x) ifelse(is.nan(x),0,x), how="replace" )
$a
[1] 1 2 3 0 5 8 0 0

$b
[1] 0 2 3 0 5 8 0 0

lapply would work too, but rapply deals properly with nested lists in this situation.