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

In a related link (suppress NAs in paste()) I present a version of paste with a na.rm option (with the unfortunate name of paste5).

With this the code becomes

cols <- c("x", "y", "z")
cbind.data.frame(a = data$a, mycol = paste2(data[, cols], na.rm = TRUE))

The output of paste5 is a character, which works if you have character data otherwise you'll need to coerce to the type you want.