Merge a list of dataframes together by column value

Question

I have a list of dataframes df_list that looks like this:

 head(df_list[[1]])
       score    name  rank
 921   9718     aba   921
 346   11387    aca   346

head(df_list[[2]]
       score    name  rank
 1080  9023     aba   1080
 156   12276    aca   156

and I would like to merge them together on the name, so that I get something like

       score.1  rank.1   score.2   rank.2
 aba   9718     921      9023      1080 
 aca   11387    346      12276     156  

I tried using do.call and cbind like

tmp <- do.call("cbind", df_list)

however, this gives me

head(tmp)
      score    name  rank   score   name   rank
921   9718     aba   921    9718    aba    1080 
346   11387    aca   346    11387   aca    156 

and when I try to get the rankings with tmp[tmp$rank] I can only get the first column named rank.

Answer 1

Using merge

 merge(dt1,dt2,by='name', suffixes = c(".1",".2"))
  name score.1 rank.1 score.2 rank.2
1  aba    9718    921    9023   1080
2  aca   11387    346   12276    156

If you have more than 2 elements:

ll <- list(dt1,dt2)

Merge <- 
  function(x,y)
merge(x,y,by='name', suffixes = c(".1",".2"))
Reduce(Merge,ll)
 name score.1 rank.1 score.2 rank.2
1  aba    9718    921    9023   1080
2  aca   11387    346   12276    156