Determine level of nesting in R?

You can now use depth() from the purrr package!

Note: currently the function is part of the development version of purrr but will become part of the official CRAN version once the package gets a version bump

A little recursive function can do this for you:

depth <- function(this,thisdepth=0){
  if(!is.list(this)){
    return(thisdepth)
  }else{
    return(max(unlist(lapply(this,depth,thisdepth=thisdepth+1))))    
  }
}

If you've got package:testthat, here's a test set:

l1=list(1,2,3)
l2=list(1,2,l1,4)
l3=list(1,l1,l2,5)

require(testthat)
expect_equal(depth(l1),1)
expect_equal(depth(l2),2)
expect_equal(depth(l3),3)

Apologies for using lower-case L in variable names. Readability fail.