How to create an empty dataframe

Question

I'm trying to specify the data types for each column and name them. So basically I'm trying to create a data frame without any rows.

I have tried doing something like this:

data <- data.frame(Date=as.Date("02/02/2001", format="%m/%d/%Y"), 
                 File="", User="", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
data <- data[-1,]

The above code creates a data frame with a single row containing all the data types and the column names, but this also creates a useless row which needs ti be removed.

Is there any better way to implement this?

Answer 1

Initialize with empty vectors:

data <- data.frame(Date=as.Date(character()),
                 File=character(), 
                 User=character(), 
                 stringsAsFactors=FALSE) 

Below is another example with different column types :

data <- data.frame(Doubles=double(),
                 Ints=integer(),
                 Factors=factor(),
                 Logicals=logical(),
                 Characters=character(),
                 stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

str(data)
str(data)
'data.frame':   0 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ Doubles   : num 
 $ Ints      : int 
 $ Factors   : Factor w/ 0 levels: 
 $ Logicals  : logi 
 $ Characters: chr