data.frame rows to a list

A more modern solution uses only purrr::transpose:

library(purrr)
iris[1:2,] %>% purrr::transpose()
#> [[1]]
#> [[1]]$Sepal.Length
#> [1] 5.1
#> 
#> [[1]]$Sepal.Width
#> [1] 3.5
#> 
#> [[1]]$Petal.Length
#> [1] 1.4
#> 
#> [[1]]$Petal.Width
#> [1] 0.2
#> 
#> [[1]]$Species
#> [1] 1
#> 
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [[2]]$Sepal.Length
#> [1] 4.9
#> 
#> [[2]]$Sepal.Width
#> [1] 3
#> 
#> [[2]]$Petal.Length
#> [1] 1.4
#> 
#> [[2]]$Petal.Width
#> [1] 0.2
#> 
#> [[2]]$Species
#> [1] 1

Eureka!

xy.list <- as.list(as.data.frame(t(xy.df)))

Like this:

xy.list <- split(xy.df, seq(nrow(xy.df)))

And if you want the rownames of xy.df to be the names of the output list, you can do:

xy.list <- setNames(split(xy.df, seq(nrow(xy.df))), rownames(xy.df))