How to join a list of data frames using map

Question

Is there a tidyverse way to join a list of data frames?

I have a list of data.frames as a result of a call to map().

I have used reduce() to do something like this before, but I want to merge them as apart of pipeline. Consider the below example for reference:

library(tidyverse)

#Function to make a data.frame with an ID column and a random variable column with mean = data_mean
make.df <- function(data_mean){
  data.frame(id = 1:50,
             x = rnorm(n = 50, mean = data_mean))
}

# What I want:some function that will full_join() on a list of data frames?
my.dfs <- map(c(5, 10, 15), make.df) 

## Gives me the result I want but not so clean
my.dfs.joined <- full_join(my.dfs[[1]], my.dfs[[2]], by = 'id') %>%
  full_join(my.dfs[[3]], by = 'id')

## This gives what I want but I don't want to bind. Instead I want to merge
my.dfs.bound <- map(c(5, 10, 15), make.df) %>%
  bind_cols()

Answer 1

You can use reduce

set.seed(24)
r1 <- map(c(5, 10, 15), make.df)  %>% 
           Reduce(function(...) full_join(..., by = "id"), .)

Or you can also try this with reduce

library(purrr)
set.seed(24)
r2 <- map(c(5, 10, 15), make.df)  %>%
             reduce(full_join, by = "id")

identical(r1, r2)
#[1] TRUE