Combine two data frames by rows (rbind) when they have different sets of columns

rbind.fill from the package plyr might be what you are looking for.

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A more recent solution is to use dplyr's bind_rows function which I assume is more efficient than smartbind.

df1 <- data.frame(a = c(1:5), b = c(6:10))
df2 <- data.frame(a = c(11:15), b = c(16:20), c = LETTERS[1:5])
dplyr::bind_rows(df1, df2)
    a  b    c
1   1  6 <NA>
2   2  7 <NA>
3   3  8 <NA>
4   4  9 <NA>
5   5 10 <NA>
6  11 16    A
7  12 17    B
8  13 18    C
9  14 19    D
10 15 20    E

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Most of the base R answers address the situation where only one data.frame has additional columns or that the resulting data.frame would have the intersection of the columns. Since the OP writes I am hoping to retain the columns that do not match after the bind, an answer using base R methods to address this issue is probably worth posting.

Below, I present two base R methods: One that alters the original data.frames, and one that doesn't. Additionally, I offer a method that generalizes the non-destructive method to more than two data.frames.

First, let's get some sample data.

# sample data, variable c is in df1, variable d is in df2
df1 = data.frame(a=1:5, b=6:10, d=month.name[1:5])
df2 = data.frame(a=6:10, b=16:20, c = letters[8:12])

Two data.frames, alter originals
In order to retain all columns from both data.frames in an rbind (and allow the function to work without resulting in an error), you add NA columns to each data.frame with the appropriate missing names filled in using setdiff.

# fill in non-overlapping columns with NAs
df1[setdiff(names(df2), names(df1))] <- NA
df2[setdiff(names(df1), names(df2))] <- NA

Now, rbind-em

rbind(df1, df2)
    a  b        d    c
1   1  6  January <NA>
2   2  7 February <NA>
3   3  8    March <NA>
4   4  9    April <NA>
5   5 10      May <NA>
6   6 16     <NA>    h
7   7 17     <NA>    i
8   8 18     <NA>    j
9   9 19     <NA>    k
10 10 20     <NA>    l

Note that the first two lines alter the original data.frames, df1 and df2, adding the full set of columns to both.

Two data.frames, do not alter originals
To leave the original data.frames intact, first loop through the names that differ, return a named vector of NAs that are concatenated into a list with the data.frame using c. Then, data.frame converts the result into an appropriate data.frame for the rbind.

rbind(
  data.frame(c(df1, sapply(setdiff(names(df2), names(df1)), function(x) NA))),
  data.frame(c(df2, sapply(setdiff(names(df1), names(df2)), function(x) NA)))
)

Many data.frames, do not alter originals In the instance that you have more than two data.frames, you could do the following.

# put data.frames into list (dfs named df1, df2, df3, etc)
mydflist <- mget(ls(pattern="df\\d+"))
# get all variable names
allNms <- unique(unlist(lapply(mydflist, names)))

# put em all together
do.call(rbind,
        lapply(mydflist,
               function(x) data.frame(c(x, sapply(setdiff(allNms, names(x)),
                                                  function(y) NA)))))

Maybe a bit nicer to not see the row names of original data.frames? Then do this.

do.call(rbind,
        c(lapply(mydflist,
                 function(x) data.frame(c(x, sapply(setdiff(allNms, names(x)),
                                                    function(y) NA)))),
          make.row.names=FALSE))

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An alternative with data.table:

library(data.table)
df1 = data.frame(a = c(1:5), b = c(6:10))
df2 = data.frame(a = c(11:15), b = c(16:20), c = LETTERS[1:5])
rbindlist(list(df1, df2), fill = TRUE)

rbind will also work in data.table as long as the objects are converted to data.table objects, so

rbind(setDT(df1), setDT(df2), fill=TRUE)

will also work in this situation. This can be preferable when you have a couple of data.tables and don't want to construct a list.

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You can use smartbind from the gtools package.

Example:

library(gtools)
df1 <- data.frame(a = c(1:5), b = c(6:10))
df2 <- data.frame(a = c(11:15), b = c(16:20), c = LETTERS[1:5])
smartbind(df1, df2)
# result
     a  b    c
1.1  1  6 <NA>
1.2  2  7 <NA>
1.3  3  8 <NA>
1.4  4  9 <NA>
1.5  5 10 <NA>
2.1 11 16    A
2.2 12 17    B
2.3 13 18    C
2.4 14 19    D
2.5 15 20    E

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If the columns in df1 is a subset of those in df2 (by column names):

df3 <- rbind(df1, df2[, names(df1)])

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You could also just pull out the common column names.

> cols <- intersect(colnames(df1), colnames(df2))
> rbind(df1[,cols], df2[,cols])

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I wrote a function to do this because I like my code to tell me if something is wrong. This function will explicitly tell you which column names don't match and if you have a type mismatch. Then it will do its best to combine the data.frames anyway. The limitation is that you can only combine two data.frames at a time.

### combines data frames (like rbind) but by matching column names
# columns without matches in the other data frame are still combined
# but with NA in the rows corresponding to the data frame without
# the variable
# A warning is issued if there is a type mismatch between columns of
# the same name and an attempt is made to combine the columns
combineByName <- function(A,B) {
    a.names <- names(A)
    b.names <- names(B)
    all.names <- union(a.names,b.names)
    print(paste("Number of columns:",length(all.names)))
    a.type <- NULL
    for (i in 1:ncol(A)) {
        a.type[i] <- typeof(A[,i])
    }
    b.type <- NULL
    for (i in 1:ncol(B)) {
        b.type[i] <- typeof(B[,i])
    }
    a_b.names <- names(A)[!names(A)%in%names(B)]
    b_a.names <- names(B)[!names(B)%in%names(A)]
    if (length(a_b.names)>0 | length(b_a.names)>0){
        print("Columns in data frame A but not in data frame B:")
        print(a_b.names)
        print("Columns in data frame B but not in data frame A:")
        print(b_a.names)
    } else if(a.names==b.names & a.type==b.type){
        C <- rbind(A,B)
        return(C)
    }
    C <- list()
    for(i in 1:length(all.names)) {
        l.a <- all.names[i]%in%a.names
        pos.a <- match(all.names[i],a.names)
        typ.a <- a.type[pos.a]
        l.b <- all.names[i]%in%b.names
        pos.b <- match(all.names[i],b.names)
        typ.b <- b.type[pos.b]
        if(l.a & l.b) {
            if(typ.a==typ.b) {
                vec <- c(A[,pos.a],B[,pos.b])
            } else {
                warning(c("Type mismatch in variable named: ",all.names[i],"\n"))
                vec <- try(c(A[,pos.a],B[,pos.b]))
            }
        } else if (l.a) {
            vec <- c(A[,pos.a],rep(NA,nrow(B)))
        } else {
            vec <- c(rep(NA,nrow(A)),B[,pos.b])
        }
        C[[i]] <- vec
    }
    names(C) <- all.names
    C <- as.data.frame(C)
    return(C)
}

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gtools/smartbind didnt like working with Dates, probably because it was as.vectoring. So here's my solution...

sbind = function(x, y, fill=NA) {
    sbind.fill = function(d, cols){ 
        for(c in cols)
            d[[c]] = fill
        d
    }

    x = sbind.fill(x, setdiff(names(y),names(x)))
    y = sbind.fill(y, setdiff(names(x),names(y)))

    rbind(x, y)
}

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Just for the documentation. You can try the Stack library and its function Stack in the following form:

Stack(df_1, df_2)

I have also the impression that it is faster than other methods for large data sets.

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Maybe I completely misread your question, but the "I am hoping to retain the columns that do not match after the bind" makes me think you are looking for a left join or right join similar to an SQL query. R has the merge function that lets you specify left, right, or inner joins similar to joining tables in SQL.

There is already a great question and answer on this topic here: How to join (merge) data frames (inner, outer, left, right)?

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You could also use sjmisc::add_rows(), which uses dplyr::bind_rows(), but unlike bind_rows(), add_rows() preserves attributes and hence is useful for labelled data.

See following example with a labelled dataset. The frq()-function prints frequency tables with value labels, if the data is labelled.

library(sjmisc)
library(dplyr)

data(efc)
# select two subsets, with some identical and else different columns
x1 <- efc %>% select(1:5) %>% slice(1:10)
x2 <- efc %>% select(3:7) %>% slice(11:20)

str(x1)
#> 'data.frame':    10 obs. of  5 variables:
#>  $ c12hour : num  16 148 70 168 168 16 161 110 28 40
#>   ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "average number of hours of care per week"
#>  $ e15relat: num  2 2 1 1 2 2 1 4 2 2
#>   ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "relationship to elder"
#>   ..- attr(*, "labels")= Named num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
#>   .. ..- attr(*, "names")= chr  "spouse/partner" "child" "sibling" "daughter or son -in-law" ...
#>  $ e16sex  : num  2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2
#>   ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "elder's gender"
#>   ..- attr(*, "labels")= Named num  1 2
#>   .. ..- attr(*, "names")= chr  "male" "female"
#>  $ e17age  : num  83 88 82 67 84 85 74 87 79 83
#>   ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "elder' age"
#>  $ e42dep  : num  3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
#>   ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "elder's dependency"
#>   ..- attr(*, "labels")= Named num  1 2 3 4
#>   .. ..- attr(*, "names")= chr  "independent" "slightly dependent" "moderately dependent" "severely dependent"

bind_rows(x1, x1) %>% frq(e42dep)
#> 
#> # e42dep <numeric> 
#> # total N=20  valid N=20  mean=3.70  sd=0.47
#>  
#>   val frq raw.prc valid.prc cum.prc
#>     3   6      30        30      30
#>     4  14      70        70     100
#>  <NA>   0       0        NA      NA

add_rows(x1, x1) %>% frq(e42dep)
#> 
#> # elder's dependency (e42dep) <numeric> 
#> # total N=20  valid N=20  mean=3.70  sd=0.47
#>  
#>  val                label frq raw.prc valid.prc cum.prc
#>    1          independent   0       0         0       0
#>    2   slightly dependent   0       0         0       0
#>    3 moderately dependent   6      30        30      30
#>    4   severely dependent  14      70        70     100
#>   NA                   NA   0       0        NA      NA

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You can insert them at the end of your original database (db1) adding the number of rows of your second database. The columns that are not included in db2 will show NA values.

db1[nrow(db1)+1:nrow(db1)+nrow(db2), names(db2)] <- db2

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rbind.ordered=function(x,y){

  diffCol = setdiff(colnames(x),colnames(y))
  if (length(diffCol)>0){
    cols=colnames(y)
    for (i in 1:length(diffCol)) y=cbind(y,NA)
    colnames(y)=c(cols,diffCol)
  }

  diffCol = setdiff(colnames(y),colnames(x))
  if (length(diffCol)>0){
    cols=colnames(x)
    for (i in 1:length(diffCol)) x=cbind(x,NA)
    colnames(x)=c(cols,diffCol)
  }
  return(rbind(x, y[, colnames(x)]))
}

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