rbind error: "names do not match previous names"

Question

As part of a larger problem (adding a ,makeUniqueIDs argument to rbind.SpatialPolygonsDataFrame for situations when the polygon IDs are identical), I'm running into this weird message from rbind:

> do.call("rbind",xd.small)
Error in match.names(clabs, names(xi)) : 
  names do not match previous names

xd.small dput output

The only other info I could find on this was this question, which leads me to believe that rbind was at the root of the problem there also.

I can just write my own rbind-like function of course, but presumably this match.names check occurs for a reason, and I'm curious what it is.

IRTFM · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-04T04:21:45.743

95

The names (column names) of the first dataframe do not match the names of the second one. Just as the error message says.

> identical(names(xd.small[[1]]), names(xd.small[[2]]) )
[1] FALSE

If you do not care about the names of the 3rd or 4th columns of the second df, you can coerce them to be the same:

> names(xd.small[[1]]) <- names(xd.small[[2]]) 
> identical(names(xd.small[[1]]), names(xd.small[[2]]) )
[1] TRUE

Then things should proceed happily.

edited Jul 04 '21 at 04:21

answered Aug 18 '12 at 14:49

IRTFM

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D'oh. I'd checked them by eye with `lapply(xd,names)` but didn't notice the numbers were different. – Ari B. Friedman Aug 18 '12 at 14:54
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maybe the `smartbind` from `gtools` package could be useful. – Tyler Rinker Aug 18 '12 at 14:54
@TylerRinker That's a cool function. I'll file it away for future use, but for this I'd rather stay with base R. – Ari B. Friedman Aug 18 '12 at 14:57
I didn't notice the subtle differences the first time I looked either, and wondered if there were some non-printing character that snuck in past dput. – IRTFM Aug 18 '12 at 15:08
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`rbind.fill` from `plyr` is faster than `smartbind` – eddi May 17 '13 at 18:47
I'm getting this error with the identical test = TRUE – Hack-R Dec 16 '16 at 19:41
I don't understand what you are saying. I just repeated my process and I get the same results as I did 4 years ago. – IRTFM Dec 16 '16 at 20:16
Very clean answer. Thanks. – stephanmg May 05 '20 at 15:05

score 44 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 16 '14 at 19:39

44

easy enough to use the unname() function:

data.frame <- unname(data.frame)

edited Jul 16 '14 at 19:39

David Arenburg

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answered Jan 16 '14 at 10:51

Dr Nick Engerer

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I believe rbind() actually requires the columns to have names. `rbind(unname(df[, 1:2]), unname(df[, 3:4]))` results in an `Error in if (facCol[jj]) { : missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed` error for me. – Mark Egge Nov 12 '18 at 23:36

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 21 '16 at 08:44

3

rbind() needs the two object names to be the same. For example, the first object names: ID Age, the next object names: ID Gender,if you want to use rbind(), it will print out:

names do not match previous names

edited Jun 21 '16 at 08:44

Draken

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answered Jun 21 '16 at 08:26

J Recaido

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score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 03 '17 at 15:11

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Use code as follows:

mylist <- lapply(pressure, function(i)read.xlsx(i,colNames = FALSE))#
mydata <- do.call('rbind',mylist)#

edited Aug 03 '17 at 15:11

Paul Roub

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answered Aug 03 '17 at 15:06

user8412546

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rbind error: "names do not match previous names"

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