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extra arguments in do.call applied to a list of dataframes

2 messages · Remi Genevest, Ista Zahn

Original
Remi Genevest
# 
Hello,

I have a list of dataframes with different number of rows and I want to bind
columns by rownames and put some NAs where rownames do not match.

I was thinking about doing something like this :

do.call(merge,c(mylist,by="row.names",all.x=TRUE))

but I get the following error message :

/Erreur dans fix.by(by.x, x) : 
  'by' doit sp?cifier lune ou plusieurs colonnes comme des entiers, des noms
ou des valeurs logiques
/

Have you any ideas to fix it?

Thing is that it works fine when I try with a list of 2 dataframes, but goes
wrong with 3 and more dataframes. (see examples below)

## works well with 2 dataframes :
mylist<-list() 
mylist[[1]]<-data.frame(y=seq(1,10))
mylist[[2]]<-data.frame(y=seq(1,5))
do.call(merge,c(mylist,by="row.names",all.x=TRUE))

   Row.names y.x y.y
1          1   1   1
2         10  10  NA
3          2   2   2
4          3   3   3
5          4   4   4
6          5   5   5
7          6   6  NA
8          7   7  NA
9          8   8  NA
10         9   9  NA

## fails with 3 df :
mylist<-list()
mylist[[1]]<-data.frame(y=seq(1,10)) 
mylist[[2]]<-data.frame(y=seq(1,5))
mylist[[3]]<-data.frame(y=seq(1,7))
do.call(merge,c(mylist,by="row.names",all.x=TRUE))

/Erreur dans fix.by(by.x, x) : 
  'by' doit sp?cifier lune ou plusieurs colonnes comme des entiers, des noms
ou des valeurs logiques/

Thanks for help !!




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Ista Zahn
# 
I would just move the row.names to a column, and use Reduce instead of
do.call. Like this:

mylist <- lapply(mylist, function(x) data.frame(row = rownames(x), x))
Reduce(function(x, y){merge(x, y, by = "row", all=TRUE)}, mylist)

Best,
Ista
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Remi Genevest <rgenevest at free.fr> wrote: