Update large dataframe with new entry according to the columns in R?

Question

I have a large dataframe (50+ columns). I get each row in different order of columns and I need to add a new row to the dataframe but this new row should update the right columns.

For example, I have a df:

col1 col2 col3 col4 col5 col6 col7 col8 col9  col10 .........
1    a    Don  Lu   854  W    eee  1    1234  yes 
4    s34  Dino Ken  44   S    aaa  1    3432  no
5    1ee  Pupu Dar  2215 R    bbb  -4   12121 yes

I get a new entry:

col6 col2 col5 col4 col3 col1 col7 col10 col9  col8 .........
R    re3  666  Rino Pino 33   ddd  no    55874 6

I thought about dplyr arrange function to arrange by names and update, I can also use $ to update each one, please advise what is the best practice?

Answer 1

Asumming your new entry is a data.frame() and called df1, I would use rbindlist() from the data.table package.

merged <- list(df, df1)
rbindlist(merged, fill = TRUE)

will do the job very quickly. In fact, you can put as many entries you want in the list

merged <- list(df1, df2, ...... , df99999, df100000)
rbindlist(merged, fill = TRUE)

does the job pretty quickly.

Note that any entries in df1 that are not in df and vise-versa will be made NA accordingly.