smartbind: Efficient rbind of data frames, even if the column names...
In gtools: Various R Programming Tools

Description Usage Arguments Value Author(s) See Also Examples

Efficient rbind of data frames, even if the column names don't match

1	smartbind(..., list, fill=NA, sep=':', verbose=FALSE)

`...`	Data frames to combine
`list`	List containing data frames to combine
`fill`	Value to use when 'filling' missing columns. Defaults to `NA`.
`sep`	Character string used to separate column names when pasting them together.
`verbose`	Logical flag indicating whether to display processing messages. Defaults to `FALSE`.

The returned data frame will contain:

`columns`	all columns present in any provided data frame
`rows`	a set of rows from each provided data frame, with values in columns not present in the given data frame filled with missing (`NA`) values.

The data type of columns will be preserved, as long as all data frames with a given column name agree on the data type of that column. If the data frames disagree, the column will be converted into a character strings. The user will need to coerce such character columns into an appropriate type.

Gregory R. Warnes greg@warnes.net

rbind, cbind

  df1 <- data.frame(A=1:10, B=LETTERS[1:10], C=rnorm(10) )
  df2 <- data.frame(A=11:20, D=rnorm(10), E=letters[1:10] )

  # rbind would fail
## Not run: 
  rbind(df1, df2)
  # Error in match.names(clabs, names(xi)) : names do not match previous
  # names:
  #	D, E

## End(Not run)
  # but smartbind combines them, appropriately creating NA entries
  smartbind(df1, df2)

  # specify fill=0 to put 0 into the missing row entries
  smartbind(df1, df2, fill=0)