[R] idiom for constructing data frame

[Ista Zahn]

You can make it as elegant as you want, e.g.,

make.empty.df <- function(nrow,ncol, names) {
    if(length(names) %% ncol != 0) stop("Lenght of names is not a
multiple of the number of colums")
    data.frame(matrix(NA, nrow, ncol, dimnames = list(NULL, names)))
}


Best,
Ista

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:37 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Duncan Murdoch suggested:
>
>> The matrix() function has a dimnames argument, so you could do this:
>>
>> names <- c("strat", "id", "pid")
>> data.frame(matrix(NA, nrow=10, ncol=3, dimnames=list(NULL, names)))
>
> That's a definite improvement, thanks. But no way to skip matrix()? It
> just seems unRlike, although since it's only full of NA values there
> are no coercion issues with column types or anything, so it doesn't
> hurt. It's just inelegant. :)
>
> Sarah
> --
> Sarah Goslee
> http://www.functionaldiversity.org
>
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