Merge Two df with different number of columns with R

Question

I have two dataframes, they have an overlapping set of columns but some unique columns too.

They also contain some of the same observations.

To give a concrete example:

df1 <- data.frame(Name = c("a", "b", "c", "d"), 
               age = c(1:4), 
               party = c(3:6)
)    


df2 <- data.frame(Name = c("a", "e", "c", "f"), 
              other = c(10:13), 
              party = c(3:6)
)

Both dfs contain the observations for a and c

How would I merge the dfs to create a new df that contains all the columns, but does not repeat observations?

Thanks for showing that this question already has an answer. One thing to consider is that many answers to this question assume some level of familiarity with database or sql-like vocabulary — Abe, Jul 27 '17 at 22:03

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 27 '17 at 21:56

2

You can use merge() from base R.

merge(df1, df2, all=T)
# Name party age other
# 1    a     3   1    10
# 2    b     4   2    NA
# 3    c     5   3    12
# 4    d     6   4    NA
# 5    e     4  NA    11
# 6    f     6  NA    13

answered Jul 27 '17 at 21:56

Eldioo

522
5
11

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '17 at 21:55

You can use the full_join from dplyr for that:

library(dplyr)

full_join(df1, df2)

Which gives you:

  Name age party other
1    a   1     3    10
2    b   2     4    NA
3    c   3     5    12
4    d   4     6    NA
5    e  NA     4    11
6    f  NA     6    13

Hope that helps!

Merge Two df with different number of columns with R

2 Answers2