Say your function in sapply returns a matrix with a variable number of rows. For example

ff <- function( i ) matrix( i, ncol= 3, nrow= i )
pipa <- sapply( 1:3, , simplify= "array" )

sapply is too stupid to see the pattern here (or maybe I don’t know how to cast the return value into an appropriate shape…). The result of the above is a list:

[[1]]
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    1    1

[[2]]
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2    2    2
[2,]    2    2    2

[[3]]
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    3    3    3
[2,]    3    3    3
[3,]    3    3    3

However, we can turn this list of matrices into a simple matrix using Reduce:

pipa <- Reduce( function( ... ) rbind( ... ), pipa )