Combine column to remove NA's

Question

I have some columns in R and for each row there will only ever be a value in one of them, the rest will be NA\'s. I want to combine these into one column with the non-NA val

Answer 1

Something like this ?

data.frame(a=data$a, mycol=apply(data[,-1],1,sum,na.rm=TRUE))

gives :

  a mycol
1 A     1
2 B     2
3 C     3
4 D     4
5 E     5