How to append rows to an R data frame

Question

I have looked around StackOverflow  but I cannot find a solution specific to my problem  which involves appending rows to an R data frame   I am initializing an empty 2-column data frame  as follows   df   data frame x   numeric    y   character      Then  my goal is to iterate through a list of values and  in each iteration  append a value to the end of the list  I started with the following code   for  i in 1 10        df x   rbind df x  i      df y   rbind df y  toString i       I also attempted the functions c  append  and merge without success  Please let me know if you have any suggestions

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Update with purrr  tidyr  amp  dplyr As the question is already dated  6 years   the answers are missing a solution with newer packages tidyr and purrr  So for people working with these packages  I want to add a solution to the previous answers - all quite interesting  especially   The biggest advantage of purrr and tidyr are better readability IMHO  purrr replaces lapply with the more flexible map   family  tidyr offers the super-intuitive method add row - just does what it says    map df 1 1000  function x    df   gt   add row x   x  y   toString x       This solution is short and intuitive to read  and it s relatively fast  system time     map df 1 1000  function x    df   gt   add row x   x  y   toString x           user  system elapsed     0 756   0 006   0 766  It scales almost linearly  so for 1e5 rows  the performance is  system time    map df 1 100000  function x    df   gt   add row x   x  y   toString x           user  system elapsed   76 035   0 259  76 489   which would make it rank second right after data table  if your ignore the placebo  in the benchmark by  Adam Ryczkowski  nr  function      time 4   data frame    228 251  3   sqlite        133 716 2   data table      3 059 1   rbindlist     169 998  0   placebo         0 202

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My solution is almost the same as the original answer but it doesn t worked for me   So  I gave names for the columns and it works   painel  lt - rbind painel  data frame  col1    xtweets created at                                      col2    xtweets text

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A more generic solution for might be the following       extendDf  lt - function  df  n        withFactors  lt - sum sapply  df  function X   is factor X       gt  0     nr           lt - nrow  df      colNames     lt - names df      for  c in 1 length colNames             if  is factor df  c                  col          lt - vector  mode  character   length   nr n               col 1 nr     lt - as character df  c               col  nr 1   n nr   lt - rep col 1   n     to avoid extra levels             col          lt - as factor col            else               col          lt - vector  mode mode df 1 c    length   nr n              class col    lt - class  df 1 c               col 1 nr     lt - df  c                     if  c  1                newDf        lt - data frame  col  stringsAsFactors withFactors            else               newDf  c     lt - col                      names newDf   lt - colNames     newDf     The function extendDf   extends a data frame with n rows   As an example   aDf  lt - data frame  l TRUE  i 1L  n 1  c  a   t Sys time    stringsAsFactors   TRUE  extendDf  aDf  2         l i n c                   t   1  TRUE 1 1 a 2016-07-06 17 12 30   2 FALSE 0 0 a 1970-01-01 01 00 00   3 FALSE 0 0 a 1970-01-01 01 00 00  system time  eDf  lt - extendDf  aDf  100000        user  system elapsed      0 009   0 002   0 010 system time  eDf  lt - extendDf  eDf  100000        user  system elapsed      0 068   0 002   0 070

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Lets take a vector  point  which has numbers from 1 to 5   point   c 1 2 3 4 5   if we want to append a number 6 anywhere inside the vector then below command may come handy  i  Vectors  new var   append point  6  after   length point    ii  columns of a table  new var   append point  6  after   length mtcars mpg    The command append takes three arguments    the vector column to be modified  value to be included in the modified vector  a subscript  after which the values are to be appended    simple      Apologies in case of any

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Let s benchmark the three solutions proposed     use rbind f1  lt - function n     df  lt - data frame x   numeric    y   character      for i in 1 n       df  lt - rbind df  data frame x   i  y   toString i          df     use list f2  lt - function n     df  lt - data frame x   numeric    y   character    stringsAsFactors   FALSE    for i in 1 n       df i    lt - list i  toString i         df     pre-allocate space f3  lt - function n     df  lt - data frame x   numeric 1000   y   character 1000   stringsAsFactors   FALSE    for i in 1 n       df x i   lt - i     df y i   lt - toString i        df   system time f1 1000       user  system elapsed      1 33    0 00    1 32  system time f2 1000       user  system elapsed      0 19    0 00    0 19  system time f3 1000       user  system elapsed      0 14    0 00    0 14   The best solution is to pre-allocate space  as intended in R   The next-best solution is to use list  and the worst solution  at least based on these timing results  appears to be rbind

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Suppose you simply don t know the size of the data frame in advance  It can well be a few rows  or a few millions  You need to have some sort of container  that grows dynamically  Taking in consideration my experience and all related answers in SO I come with 4 distinct solutions    rbindlist to the data frame Use data table s fast set operation and couple it with manually doubling the table when needed  Use RSQLite and append to the table held in memory  data frame s own ability to grow and use custom environment  which has reference semantics  to store the data frame so it will not be copied on return    Here is a test of all the methods for both small and large number of appended rows  Each method has 3 functions associated with it    create first element  that returns the appropriate backing object with first element put in  append object  element  that appends the element to the end of the table  represented by object    access object  gets the data frame with all the inserted elements    rbindlist to the data frame  That is quite easy and straight-forward   create 1 lt -function elems      return as data table elems      append 1 lt -function dt  elems       return rbindlist list dt   elems  use names   TRUE      access 1 lt -function dt      return dt      data table  set   manually doubling the table when needed   I will store the true length of the table in a rowcount attribute   create 2 lt -function elems      return as data table elems      append 2 lt -function dt  elems      n lt -attr dt   rowcount     if  is null n       n lt -nrow dt    if  n  nrow dt           tmp lt -elems 1      tmp  1   lt -rep NA n      dt lt -rbindlist list dt  tmp   fill TRUE  use names TRUE      setattr dt  rowcount   n        pos lt -as integer match names elems   colnames dt      for  j in seq along pos           set dt  i as integer n 1   pos  j    elems  j          setattr dt  rowcount  n 1    return dt     access 2 lt -function elems      n lt -attr elems   rowcount     return as data table elems 1 n         SQL should be optimized for fast record insertion  so I initially had high hopes for RSQLite solution  This is basically copy amp paste of Karsten W  answer on similar thread   create 3 lt -function elems      con  lt - RSQLite  dbConnect RSQLite  SQLite      memory      RSQLite  dbWriteTable con   t   as data frame elems     return con     append 3 lt -function con  elems       RSQLite  dbWriteTable con   t   as data frame elems   append TRUE    return con     access 3 lt -function con      return RSQLite  dbReadTable con   t   row names NULL       data frame s own row-appending   custom environment   create 4 lt -function elems      env lt -new env     env dt lt -as data frame elems    return env     append 4 lt -function env  elems       env dt nrow env dt  1   lt -elems   return env     access 4 lt -function env      return env dt      The test suite   For convenience I will use one test function to cover them all with indirect calling   I checked  using do call instead of calling the functions directly doesn t makes the code run measurable longer    test lt -function id  n 1000      n lt -n-1   el lt -list a 1 b 2 c 3 d 4    o lt -do call paste0  create   id  list el     s lt -paste0  append   id    for  i in 1 n          o lt -do call s list o el         return do call paste0  access    id   list o        Let s see the performance for n 10 insertions   I also added a  placebo  functions  with suffix 0  that don t perform anything - just to measure the overhead of the test setup   r lt -microbenchmark test 0 n 10   test 1 n 10  test 2 n 10  test 3 n 10   test 4 n 10   autoplot r         For 1E5 rows  measurements done on Intel R  Core TM  i7-4710HQ CPU   2 50GHz    nr  function      time 4   data frame    228 251  3   sqlite        133 716 2   data table      3 059 1   rbindlist     169 998  0   placebo         0 202   It looks like the SQLite-based sulution  although regains some speed on large data  is nowhere near data table   manual exponential growth  The difference is almost two orders of magnitude   Summary  If you know that you will append rather small number of rows  n lt  100   go ahead and use the simplest possible solution  just assign the rows to the data frame using bracket notation and ignore the fact that the data frame is not pre-populated   For everything else use data table  set and grow the data table exponentially  e g  using my code

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Update  Not knowing what you are trying to do  I ll share one more suggestion  Preallocate vectors of the type you want for each column  insert values into those vectors  and then  at the end  create your data frame   Continuing with Julian s f3  a preallocated data frame  as the fastest option so far  defined as     pre-allocate space f3  lt - function n     df  lt - data frame x   numeric n   y   character n   stringsAsFactors   FALSE    for i in 1 n       df x i   lt - i     df y i   lt - toString i        df     Here s a similar approach  but one where the data frame is created as the last step     Use preallocated vectors f4  lt - function n      x  lt - numeric n    y  lt - character n    for  i in 1 n        x i   lt - i     y i   lt - i       data frame x  y  stringsAsFactors FALSE      microbenchmark from the  microbenchmark  package will give us more comprehensive insight than system time   library microbenchmark  microbenchmark f1 1000   f3 1000   f4 1000   times   5    Unit  milliseconds        expr         min          lq      median         uq         max neval    f1 1000  1024 539618 1029 693877 1045 972666 1055 25931 1112 769176     5    f3 1000   149 417636  150 529011  150 827393  151 02230  160 637845     5    f4 1000     7 872647    7 892395    7 901151    7 95077    8 049581     5   f1    the approach below  is incredibly inefficient because of how often it calls data frame and because growing objects that way is generally slow in R  f3   is much improved due to preallocation  but the data frame structure itself might be part of the bottleneck here  f4   tries to bypass that bottleneck without compromising the approach you want to take     Original answer  This is really not a good idea  but if you wanted to do it this way  I guess you can try   for  i in 1 10      df  lt - rbind df  data frame x   i  y   toString i        Note that in your code  there is one other problem    You should use stringsAsFactors if you want the characters to not get converted to factors  Use  df   data frame x   numeric    y   character    stringsAsFactors   FALSE

[r] How to append rows to an R data frame

Update with purrr, tidyr & dplyr

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