String to list and visa versa

On Tuesday 14 November 2006 12:28 pm, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

This approach won't work in very many cases (but then nor will write.csv).

The safest way I know is to use serialize() and unserialize().  Next to
that, deparse(control="all") and parse(text=) are quite good and give a
human-readable character representation.

If fidelity is not the main issue, as.character and toString spring to
mind.  unlist is recursive, and is not going to come close to being
faithful for other than very simple lists. And what if ',' is a character
in one of the list elements?

Yes, but then one can replace ',' with something rarely used like \007.
I picked ',' because write.csv/read.csv worked before.

You are right, for storage serialize/unserialize seem best, however for
manipulation one would usually prefer a well-defined format.