[R] Problem with binding data-frames

[Junnila, Jouni]

Hi, 

Yes, I'm aware that the problem is that I have differing number of
columns in the different datasets. My question still remains. Is there
some way I can allow column numbers to be different, or is there some
other way combining these datasets?

Thanks,
-Jouni

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Petr Klasterecky wrote:

> Junnila, Jouni napsal(a):
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm having a problem concerning r-binding datasets.
>>
>> I have six datasets, from six different plates, and two different
days.
>> I want to combine these datasets together for analysis. Datasets from

>> day 2, have all the same columns than datasets from day 1. However in

>> addition, there are few columns more in day 2. Thus, using rbind for 
>> this, results a error, because the objects are not the same length.
>>
>> Error in paste(nmi[nii == 0L], collapse = ", ") :
>>         object "nii" not found
>> In addition: Warning message:
>> longer object length
>>         is not a multiple of shorter object length in: clabs == nmi
>
> Hi,
>
> 1. the error has nothing to do with differing lengths of your objects 
> - that's what the following warning is about. The error occured 
> because your indexing object 'nii' does not exist where R is looking
for it.

It's because the dataframes have differing number of columns, and that
has not been allowed for in the error message in that version of R.

> 2. using rbind on dataframes is a bad practice, since the input is 
> converted to marices if possible. Use merge() instead.

Not so: rbind on data frames does no such conversion, and is not
problematic provided they have the same column names (and hence the same
number of columns).  You may have missed in ?rbind

      The functions 'cbind' and 'rbind' are S3 generic, with methods for
      data frames.  The data frame method will be used if at least one
      argument is a data frame and the rest are vectors or matrices.
...

and a later description of the data frame method for 'rbind'.

>
> Petr
>
>>
>>
>> What I need, is to combine all the six together, and give for example

>> NA-value in day 1, for those columns which can only be found in day
2.
>> Is this somehow possible?
>>
>> I have several of these six-datasets groups, and only few of them are

>> having this problem described above, and I cannot know in advance
which.
>> With most of the groups writing
>> rbind(data1,data2,data3,data4,data5,data6)
>> works easily, but these few problematic groups need also to be 
>> combined...
>> Any help greatly appreciated!
>>
>> -Jouni
>>
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>> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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