you may be looking for ?merge
hth, Ingmar

On 22 Apr 2008, at 15:05, Tania Oh wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I want to read in 1000 files which contain varying number of columns.
> For example:
>
> file[1] contains 8 columns (mixture of characters and numbers)
> file[2] contains 16 columns etc
>
> I'm reading everything into one big data frame and when I try rbind, R
> returns an error of
> "Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) :
>    numbers of columns of arguments do not match"
>
>
> Below is my code:
>
> all <- NULL
> all <- as.data.frame(all)
>
> ##read in the contents of the files
> for (f in 1:length(fnames)){
>
>        tmp <- try(read.table(fnames[f], header=F, fill=T, sep="\t"),
> TRUE)
>
>        if (class(tmp) == "try-error") {
>                next ## skip this file if it's empty/non-existent
>         }else{
> 	       ## combine all the file contents into one big data frame
>                 all <- rbind(all, tmp)
>    }
> }
>
>
> Here is some example of what the data in the files:
>
> L3 <- LETTERS[1:3]
> (d <- data.frame(cbind(x=1, y=1:10), fac=sample(L3, 10,  
> replace=TRUE)))
>
>> str(d)
> 'data.frame':	10 obs. of  3 variables:
>   $ x  : num  1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
>   $ y  : num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
>   $ fac: Factor w/ 3 levels "A","B","C": 1 3 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 2
>
> my.fake.data <- data.frame(cbind(x=1, y=2))
>> str(my.fake.data)
> 'data.frame':	1 obs. of  2 variables:
>   $ x: num 1
>   $ y: num 2
>
>
> all <- rbind(d, my.fake.data)
>
> Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) :
>    numbers of columns of arguments do not match
>
>
> I've searched the R-site but couldn't find any relevant solution.I
> might have used the wrong keywords to search, so if this question has
> been answered already, I'd be very grateful if someone could point me
> to the post. Else any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Many thanks in advance,
> tania
>
> D.Phil student
> Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics
> University of Oxford
>
> ______________________________________________
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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.

Ingmar Visser
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam
Roetersstraat 15
1018 WB Amsterdam
The Netherlands
t: +31-20-5256723



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