Merge multiple data frame

Question

df1 <- data.frame(name = c("A","B","C"), f1 = c(1,2,3), f2 = c("zz","mo","do"))
df2 <- data.frame(name = c("D","B","C"), f1 = c(1,4,6), f2 = c("ok","no","do"))
df3 <- data.frame(name = c("D","E","C"), f1 = c(1,2,3), f2 = c("so","yo","kl"))

I want to merge them into one data frame, so that it looks like

name    df.1f1   df1.f2    df2.f1   df2.f2   df3.f1   df3.f2
A            1       zz        na       na       na       na     
B            2       mo         4       no       na       na      
C            3       do         6       do        3       kl
D           na       na         1       ok        1       so
E           na       na        na       na        2       yo

Although I can use repeated dplyr::full_join to do this but it is too tedious. Anyone have a better way to do this?

Look at the `Reduce` function, and search SO for combinations of `Reduce` and `merge`. — A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1, Dec 23 '17 at 06:32

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '17 at 07:53

15

In case you have multiple dataframes you can make a list of them. Inspired by vaettchen

Reduce(function(x,y) merge(x,y,by="name",all=TRUE) ,list(df1,df2,df3))

answered Dec 23 '17 at 07:53

PIG

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score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 23 '17 at 07:14

As always in R, there a lot of ways. For me, a nested merge would do the job well enough:

merge( merge( df1, df2, by = "name", all = TRUE ), df3, by = "name", all = TRUE )

  name f1.x f2.x f1.y f2.y f1   f2
1    A    1   zz   NA <NA> NA <NA>
2    B    2   mo    4   no NA <NA>
3    C    3   do    6   do  3   kl
4    D   NA <NA>    1   ok  1   so
5    E   NA <NA>   NA <NA>  2   yo

Merge multiple data frame

2 Answers2