Split a vector into chunks

Using base R's rep_len:

x <- 1:10
n <- 3

split(x, rep_len(1:n, length(x)))
# $`1`
# [1]  1  4  7 10
# 
# $`2`
# [1] 2 5 8
# 
# $`3`
# [1] 3 6 9

And as already mentioned if you want sorted indices, simply:

split(x, sort(rep_len(1:n, length(x))))
# $`1`
# [1] 1 2 3 4
# 
# $`2`
# [1] 5 6 7
# 
# $`3`
# [1]  8  9 10

Yet another possibility is the splitIndices function from package parallel:

library(parallel)
splitIndices(20, 3)

Gives:

[[1]]
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

[[2]]
[1]  8  9 10 11 12 13

[[3]]
[1] 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

NB: this works only with numeric values though. If you want to split a character vector, you would need to do some indexing: lapply(splitIndices(20, 3), \(x) letters[1:20][x])

Simple function for splitting a vector by simply using indexes - no need to over complicate this

vsplit <- function(v, n) {
    l = length(v)
    r = l/n
    return(lapply(1:n, function(i) {
        s = max(1, round(r*(i-1))+1)
        e = min(l, round(r*i))
        return(v[s:e])
    }))
}

Sorry if this answer comes so late, but maybe it can be useful for someone else. Actually there is a very useful solution to this problem, explained at the end of ?split.

> testVector <- c(1:10) #I want to divide it into 5 parts
> VectorList <- split(testVector, 1:5)
> VectorList
$`1`
[1] 1 6

$`2`
[1] 2 7

$`3`
[1] 3 8

$`4`
[1] 4 9

$`5`
[1]  5 10

I have come up with this solution:

require(magrittr)
create.chunks <- function(x, elements.per.chunk){
    # plain R version
    # split(x, rep(seq_along(x), each = elements.per.chunk)[seq_along(x)])
    # magrittr version - because that's what people use now
    x %>% seq_along %>% rep(., each = elements.per.chunk) %>% extract(seq_along(x)) %>% split(x, .) 
}
create.chunks(letters[1:10], 3)
$`1`
[1] "a" "b" "c"

$`2`
[1] "d" "e" "f"

$`3`
[1] "g" "h" "i"

$`4`
[1] "j"

The key is to use the seq(each = chunk.size) parameter so make it work. Using seq_along acts like rank(x) in my previous solution, but is actually able to produce the correct result with duplicated entries.

Here's yet another one, allowing you to control if you want the result ordered or not:

split_to_chunks <- function(x, n, keep.order=TRUE){
  if(keep.order){
    return(split(x, sort(rep(1:n, length.out = length(x)))))
  }else{
    return(split(x, rep(1:n, length.out = length(x))))
  }
}

split_to_chunks(x = 1:11, n = 3)
$`1`
[1] 1 2 3 4

$`2`
[1] 5 6 7 8

$`3`
[1]  9 10 11

split_to_chunks(x = 1:11, n = 3, keep.order=FALSE)

$`1`
[1]  1  4  7 10

$`2`
[1]  2  5  8 11

$`3`
[1] 3 6 9

This splits into chunks of size ⌊n/k⌋+1 or ⌊n/k⌋ and does not use the O(n log n) sort.

get_chunk_id<-function(n, k){
    r <- n %% k
    s <- n %/% k
    i<-seq_len(n)
    1 + ifelse (i <= r * (s+1), (i-1) %/% (s+1), r + ((i - r * (s+1)-1) %/% s))
}

split(1:10, get_chunk_id(10,3))