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 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > 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 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.