How to Use rbind and cbind on Single Dataframe

Question

Sorry for framing the question incorrectly. As a beginner, I'm attempting to learn R on my own.

I have a situation where,

t1_df

id   name   address
1     x       india
2     y       usa

t2_df

id   name   address
3     a      india
4     b       usa

Now i tried to add extra column "msg" using data.frame i.e

t1_df <- data.frame(t1_df,msg)
t2_df <- data.frame(t2_df,msg)

t1_df

  id   name   address   msg
  1     x       india   hi
  2     y       usa     hello

t2_df

id   name   address   msg
3     a      india     go
4     b       usa      bye

when i tried to do rbind it gives error as col names are not matching because both df's having different col names

When i tried to cbind on both df's into single dataframe is t, it included all the columns from both df's i.e

colnames(t)

id   name   address   t1_msg   id   name   address   t2_msg

But i would like to get the dataframe as

id   name   address   t1_msg   t2_msg
  1     x       india   hi       NA
  2     y       usa     hello    NA
  3     a      india     NA      go
  4     b       usa      NA      bye

How do I obtain the output that I described above?

Help me out, please.

Answer 1

To obtain the desired output, you can follow these steps:

1. Create separate data frames for msg column in t1_df and t2_df. Example:

   t1_msg <- data.frame(msg = c("hi", "hello"))
   t2_msg <- data.frame(msg = c("go", "bye"))
    

2. Use cbind() to combine the dataframes while maintaining the desired column order. Example:

   t <- cbind(id = c(t1_df$id, t2_df$id),
              name = c(t1_df$name, t2_df$name),
              address = c(t1_df$address, t2_df$address),
              t1_msg = t1_msg$msg,
              t2_msg = t2_msg$msg)
   

   This will create a new dataframe t with the desired column arrangement.

The resulting t dataframe will have the desired structure:

  id   name   address   t1_msg   t2_msg
  1     x       india   hi       NA
  2     y       usa     hello    NA
  3     a      india     NA      go
  4     b       usa      NA      bye
 

Make sure the order of columns and the number of rows in t1_msg and t2_msg match the corresponding data frames (t1_df and t2_df) to avoid any mismatches.

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