On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Mary Kindall <mary.kind...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi R users, > I am new to R and am trying to merge data frames in the following way. > Suppose I have n data frames each with two fields. Field 1 is common among > data frames but may have different entries. Field 2 is different. > > > Data frame 1: > > Src Target1 > 1 aaa > 1 bbb > 1 ccc > 2 aaa > 3 ddd > > > Data frame 2: > > Src Target2 > 2 aaaa > 3 dddd > 4 bbbb > 4 eeee > 4 ffff > > > Data frame 3: > > Src Target3 > 1 xx > 3 yy > 5 zz > 6 tt > 6 uu > > And so on... > > I want to convert this into a data frame something similar to: > Src Target1 target2 > target3 > 1 aaa,bbb,ccc - xx > > 2 aaa aaaa - > 3 ddd dddd > yy > 4 - bbbb,eeee,ffff - > > 5 - > - zz > 6 - > - tt,uu > >
Try this where DF1, DF2 and DF3 are the data frames: L <- list(DF1, DF2, DF3) merge.all <- function(...) merge(..., all = TRUE) Reduce(merge.all, lapply(L, function(x) aggregate(x[2], x[1], toString))) The last line gives this: Src Target1 Target2 Target3 1 1 aaa, bbb, ccc <NA> xx 2 2 aaa aaaa <NA> 3 3 ddd dddd yy 4 4 <NA> bbbb, eeee, ffff <NA> 5 5 <NA> <NA> zz 6 6 <NA> <NA> tt, uu -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.
