Error in sum(List) : invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument

Error in sum(List) : invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument, You’ll learn how to fix the “Error in FUN: invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument” in this R lesson.

Example Data Creation

The following list will serve as the foundation for this R tutorial.

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List <- list(1:10,    15, 100)
List

[[1]]
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
[[2]]
[1] 15
[[3]]
[1] 100

The structure of our example data is seen in the previous RStudio console output — There are three list elements in this list object. There are numeric values in each of these list components.

Example 1: Reproduce the Error in sum(List) : invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument

The ” Error in sum(List) : invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument” can be replicated using the R code below.

Assume we wish to calculate the total of all elements in our data. Then, as seen in the following R code, we may use the sum function:

sum(List)                     

Error in sum(List) : invalid 'type' (list) of argument

Example 2: Fix the Error in sum(List) : invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument

The “Error in FUN: invalid ‘type’ (list) of argument” is demonstrated in this example.

To do so, we must first use the unlist function to transform our list into a vector object.

listvec <- unlist(List)
listvec

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  15 100

The structure of our modified data is shown in the preceding output. We’ve built a vector that contains all of the input list’s elements.

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We can now use the sum function for our newly modified data.

sum(listvec)
170

The sum function provides the correct result without any issues this time.