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rdataframebind

placing two pieces of different data side by side in R

I am trying to place two datasets of 3 columns side by side so that they span 6 columns. They have the same column headings.

The first one is:
enter image description here

The next one is:
enter image description here

How can I place them side by side across the page so that they total 6 columns? As you can see they are different row lengths.

I want to then be able to download them as a single .csv.

I have tried using rbind, full bind, cbind, merge, etc. but nothing seems to work for this very simple task.

Solution

  • You can merge on the row names by using 0 for the by argument, then remove the rowname column (i.e., [,-1]). Then, if you want to have duplicate column names (which is not a good idea), then you can replace the names after merging. Here, I just use subsets of mtcars as an example.

    results <- merge(df1, df2, by = 0, all = TRUE)[,-1]

names(results) <- c(names(df1), names(df2))

    Output

       mpg cyl  disp  mpg cyl disp
1 21.0   6 160.0 21.0   6  160
2 21.0   6 160.0 21.0   6  160
3 22.8   4 108.0 22.8   4  108
4 21.4   6 258.0 21.4   6  258
5 18.7   8 360.0   NA  NA   NA
6 18.1   6 225.0   NA  NA   NA
7 14.3   8 360.0   NA  NA   NA
8 24.4   4 146.7   NA  NA   NA

    Data

    df1 <- mtcars[1:8, 1:3]
row.names(df1) <- NULL

df2 <- mtcars[1:4, 1:3]
row.names(df2) <- NULL

    To apply to more than 2 dataframes, then you can use Reduce over your list of dataframes:

    results2 <- Reduce(function(x,y) merge(x, y, by = 0, all = TRUE)[,-1],
       list(df1, df2, df3, df4))

names(results2) <- unlist(lapply(list(df1, df2, df3, df4), names))