Creating an R dataframe row-by-row

You can grow them row by row by appending or using rbind().

That does not mean you should. Dynamically growing structures is one of the least efficient ways to code in R.

If you can, allocate your entire data.frame up front:

N <- 1e4  # total number of rows to preallocate--possibly an overestimate

DF <- data.frame(num=rep(NA, N), txt=rep("", N),  # as many cols as you need
                 stringsAsFactors=FALSE)          # you don't know levels yet

and then during your operations insert row at a time

DF[i, ] <- list(1.4, "foo")

That should work for arbitrary data.frame and be much more efficient. If you overshot N you can always shrink empty rows out at the end.


One can add rows to NULL:

df<-NULL;
while(...){
  #Some code that generates new row
  rbind(df,row)->df
}

for instance

df<-NULL
for(e in 1:10) rbind(df,data.frame(x=e,square=e^2,even=factor(e%%2==0)))->df
print(df)

Tags:

List

R

Dataframe