[R] Combine 'overlapping' dataframes, respecting row names

[Gabor Grothendieck]

If you are converting them to 'its' anyways then after the
conversion to 'its' use the 'its' union command.

On 8/31/06, James Howison <jhowison at syr.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've examined the archives and found quite a few questions on
> concatenating dataframes, but none that really addressed my issue,
> I'm afraid.  I've also examined the cbind and rbind documentation but
> nonetheless here I am writing to r-help ;)
>
> This is what I have (the row names are dates used for conversion to
> an irregular time series with the its package):
>
>  > cvsFrame
>            cvsactions
> 2002-11-15          4
> 2002-12-15          9
> 2003-01-15          5
> 2003-02-15          5
>
>  > downloadsFrame
>             downloads
> 2002-09-15          1
> 2002-10-15          2
> 2002-11-15         12
> 2002-12-15          8
>
> (notice how the dates are overlapping?)
>
> The output I'd like is:
>
>            cvsaction  downloads
> 2002-09-15       NA          1
> 2002-10-15       NA          2
> 2002-11-15       4          12
> 2002-12-15       9           8
> 2003-01-15       5          NA
> 2003-02-15       5          NA
>
> ie. merge the data.frames, respecting the row.names and inserting NAs
> where a frame didn't contain info for a row in the final frame.
>
> This is the closest I gotten (I'm sure cbind is doing what it's meant
> to do but it's obviously not what I need)
>
>  > cbind(downloadsFrame,cvsFrame)
>             downloads cvsactions
> 2002-09-15          1          4
> 2002-10-15          2          9
> 2002-11-15         12          5
> 2002-12-15          8          5
>
> It takes the row.names from the first frame given and then just adds
> the data in rows 1 through 4, regardless of their row.name. And it
> doesn't work at all if the column lengths are different. (Yes, it
> would be nice if the 'its' class had a way to merge 'its' objects,
> but the question seemed general enough to ask on list.)
>
> Thanks,
> James
>
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