Create a vector of vectors

A vecvec is a vector that holds elements of different types without coercing them to a common type. Unlike a list of vectors, a vecvec behaves as a flat vector (hence vector of vectors). This means that you can operations (such as indexing, arithmetic, and statistics) apply across all elements of a vecvec as if they were combined into a single vector.

Mixed-type vectors can be useful if you need to store heterogeneous data in a vector-like structure. In most cases, I believe this is bad practice for data analytics, but this could be useful for tidying up messy data. The most valuable use case for vecvec is as a data structure for mixed-type semantic vectors. This package is used by mixtime and distributional to create vectors of time with different chronons and distributions with different shapes.

To convert a vecvec back to a plain typed vector, use unvecvec(), which casts all elements to a common type via vctrs::vec_cast().

vecvec(...)

Arguments

...

Vectors to combine. Each vector is stored as a separate typed slot; no type coercion is performed.

Value

A vecvec object whose length equals the total number of elements across all input vectors.

See also

unvecvec() to coerce a vecvec to a single-typed vector; is_vecvec() to test whether an object is a vecvec.

Examples

# Mixed types are preserved without coercion
vv <- vecvec(Sys.Date(), rnorm(3), letters)
vv
#> <vecvec[30]>
#>  [1] 2026-04-27  0.4681544  0.3629513 -1.3045435 a          b         
#>  [7] c          d          e          f          g          h         
#> [13] i          j          k          l          m          n         
#> [19] o          p          q          r          s          t         
#> [25] u          v          w          x          y          z         

# .[i] Indexing works like a flat vector
vv[c(1L, 3L, 7L)]
#> <vecvec[3]>
#> [1] 2026-04-27 0.3629513  c         

# .[[i]] drops to the original vector type
vv[[2L]]
#> [1] 0.4681544