Remove NULL elements from list of lists

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This recursive solution has the virtue of working on even more deeply nested lists.

It’s closely modeled on Gabor Grothendieck’s answer to this quite similar question. My modification of that code is needed if the function is to also remove objects like list(NULL) (not the same as NULL), as you are wanting.

## A helper function that tests whether an object is either NULL _or_ 
## a list of NULLs
is.NullOb <- function(x) is.null(x) | all(sapply(x, is.null))

## Recursively step down into list, removing all such objects 
rmNullObs <- function(x) {
   x <- Filter(Negate(is.NullOb), x)
   lapply(x, function(x) if (is.list(x)) rmNullObs(x) else x)
}

rmNullObs(lll)
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
# 
# 
# [[2]]
# [[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"

Here is an example of its application to a more deeply nested list, on which the other currently proposed solutions variously fail.

LLLL <- list(lll)
rmNullObs(LLLL)
# [[1]]
# [[1]][[1]]
# [[1]][[1]][[1]]
# [[1]][[1]][[1]][[1]]
# [1] 1
# 
# 
# [[1]][[1]][[2]]
# [[1]][[1]][[2]][[1]]
# [1] "a"

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