Split Data Frame into List of Data Frames Based On ID Column in R (Example)

In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to separate a large data frame into a list containing multiple data frames in R.

The article looks as follows:

Let’s jump right to the example:

Creation of Exemplifying Data

Have a look at the following example data.

data <- data.frame(id = c("A", "A", "B", "B", "B", "C"),  # Example data
                   x1 = 1:6,
                   x2 = 11:16)
data                                                      # Print example data
#   id x1 x2
# 1  A  1 11
# 2  A  2 12
# 3  B  3 13
# 4  B  4 14
# 5  B  5 15
# 6  C  6 16

As you can see based on the previous RStudio console output, our example data contains six rows and three columns. The first variable is an ID-column that we can use to separate our data later on.

Example: Splitting Data Frame Based on ID Column Using split() Function

In this Example, I’ll show how to convert our data frame to a list of data frames using the split() function.

data_list <- split(data, f = data$id)                     # Split data
data_list                                                 # Print list
# $A
# id x1 x2
# 1  A  1 11
# 2  A  2 12
# 
# $B
# id x1 x2
# 3  B  3 13
# 4  B  4 14
# 5  B  5 15
# 
# $C
# id x1 x2
# 6  C  6 16

The previous output shows our resulting list object. It contains three list elements and each of these list elements is a subset of our original data frame.

Video & Further Resources

Do you need further explanations on the R code of this article? Then you could have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I illustrate the R syntax of this article in the video:

The YouTube video will be added soon.

In addition, you may have a look at the related tutorials on my website:

• Convert Data Frame Rows to List
• Split Data Frame Variable into Multiple Columns
• split & unsplit Functions in R
• Paste Multiple Columns Together
• The R Programming Language

To summarize: In this R tutorial you learned how to split huge data frames into lists. If you have any further questions and/or comments, tell me about it in the comments section. Besides that, please subscribe to my email newsletter to get updates on new articles.