CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdataframe
tchakravarty
tchakravarty

Reputation: 10954

cbind error with check.names

Here is an example where cbind fails with an error when check.names=TRUE is set.

data(airquality)
airQualityBind = cbind(airquality, airquality, check.names = TRUE)

Can anyone explain how to get this to work. I understand that cbind is a call to data.frame and the following works:

airQualityBind = data.frame(airquality, airquality, check.names = TRUE)

but I would like to understand why cbind throws an error.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5656

Answers (1)

Hong Ooi
Hong Ooi

Reputation: 57686

Your cbind call fails not because you have duplicated names, but because check.names isn't a formal argument of cbind.data.frame. It actually passes your check.names argument down the line to data.frame itself, and this fails because it also passes a check.names=FALSE argument. Thus the error is one of duplicated formal arguments to data.frame, not duplicated column names in the data frames.

To get it to work, just do cbind(airquality, airquality) (which will result in duplicated column names) or data.frame(airquality, airquality) (which will deduplicate them).

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions