What is difference between lapply and sapply?

Programming Language
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1

lapply is used to show the output in the form of list whereas sapply is used to show the output in the form of vector or data frame.

lapply returns a list of the same length as X , each element of which is the result of applying FUN to the corresponding element of X . sapply is a user-friendly version and wrapper of lapply by default returning a vector, matrix or, if simplify = “array” , an array if appropriate, by applying simplify2array() .
It is useful for operations on list objects and returns a list object of same length of original set. Sapply function in R does the same job as lapply() function but returns a vector. … Sapply in R is more efficient than lapply() in the output returned because sapply() store values direclty into a vector.

Function Arguments Objective Input Output
apply apply(x, MARGIN, FUN) Apply a function to the rows or columns or both Data frame or matrix vector, list, array
lapply lapply(X, FUN) Apply a function to all the elements of the input List, vector or data frame list
sapply sapply(X, FUN) Apply a function to all the elements of the input List, vector or data frame vector or matrix
2

In the apply family the difference mostly lies in the output return.

The lapply() stands for the list and applies functions to a the elements of the input and the output is mostly a list which is used for objects like dataframes and lists.

sapply () applies a function to all the elements of the input and returns a vector or matrix as output.