CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Kaleb
Kaleb

Reputation: 1022

Add dataframes to eachother by row retaining all columns in R

I have 3 dataframes that I would like to bind together by row but also retain the columns that each one has such that columns not present in one dataframe are just initialized to NA and added to the resultant dataframe. Since I may have many more columns than the ones provided in the example below, I can't hardcode them as I have been doing so far.

a=data.frame(v1=rnorm(10),v2=rnorm(10),v3=rnorm(10))

b=data.frame(v1=rnorm(10),v3=rnorm(10),v4=rnorm(10))

c=data.frame(v2=rnorm(10),v5=rnorm(10),v6=rnorm(10))

Desired output:

Dimensions of 30 by 6 with an output header of

v1    v2    v3    v4    v5    v6
0.0.. 0.0.. 0.0.. NA    NA    NA
0.0.. NA    0.0.. 0.0.. NA    NA
NA    0.0.. NA    NA    0.0.. 0.0..
etc.

How do I achieve this in a scaleable and efficient way?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 46

Answers (2)

jlhoward
jlhoward

Reputation: 59355

This is likely to be faster.

library(data.table)
result <- rbindlist(list(a,b,c), fill=TRUE)
result[c(1:2,11:12,21:22),]
#            v1         v2         v3         v4        v5         v6
# 1: -0.7789103  0.9362939 -1.3353714         NA        NA         NA
# 2:  1.7435594 -1.0624084  1.2827752         NA        NA         NA
# 3: -0.8456543         NA  0.6196773 -1.6647646        NA         NA
# 4: -1.2504797         NA -1.2812387  0.9288518        NA         NA
# 5:         NA  1.1489591         NA         NA 1.3822840 -1.8260830
# 6:         NA -0.8424763         NA         NA 0.1684902  0.9952818

Upvotes: 1

Steven Beaupr&#233;
Steven Beaupr&#233;

Reputation: 21621

Try:

library(dplyr)
bind_rows(a, b, c)

From the documentation:

When row-binding, columns are matched by name, and any values that don't match will be filled with NA.

Upvotes: 2

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