Issues with `purrr::map` returning unexpected data types when nesting lists in R 4.3.1
I'm having a problem with using `purrr::map` to process nested lists in R 4.3.1. I have a list of lists, where each sub-list contains various data types, and I'm trying to extract a specific element from each sub-list. However, the output is not what I expected, and I'm encountering inconsistent data types that are causing issues later in my analysis. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```r library(purrr) nested_list <- list( list(a = 1, b = "text1"), list(a = 2, b = "text2"), list(a = 3, b = "text3") ) result <- map(nested_list, ~ .x$b) ``` When I run this, I'm expecting `result` to be a character vector containing `"text1", "text2", "text3"`, but instead, I'm getting `list`: ```r > str(result) List of 3 $ : chr "text1" $ : chr "text2" $ : chr "text3" ``` I want to convert this to a simple character vector. I tried using `unlist()` like this: ```r final_result <- unlist(result) ``` However, I still feel like I'm missing something in the way I'm using `map`. Additionally, I noticed that if my sub-lists had a different structure or I tried to extract a numeric element instead, it would return numeric vectors, which seems inconsistent. Is there a more robust way to ensure that `map` returns a consistent output type? Any best practices for handling such scenarios would be greatly appreciated!