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

Though this is not the OP case, it seems some people like the approach based on sums, how about thinking in mean and mode, to make the answer more universal. This answer matches the title, which is what many people will find.

data <- data.frame('a' = c('A','B','C','D','E'),
                   'x' = c(1,2,NA,NA,9),
                   'y' = c(NA,6,3,NA,5),
                   'z' = c(NA,NA,NA,4,5))

splitdf<-split(data[,c(2:4)], seq(nrow(data[,c(2:4)])))

data$mean<-unlist(lapply(splitdf, function(x)  mean(unlist(x), na.rm=T) ) )
data$mode<-unlist(lapply(splitdf, function(x)  {
  tab <- tabulate(match(x, na.omit(unique(unlist(x) )))); 
                  paste(na.omit(unique(unlist(x) ))[tab == max(tab) ], collapse = ", " )}) )

data
  a  x  y  z     mean mode
1 A  1 NA NA 1.000000    1
2 B  2  6 NA 4.000000 2, 6
3 C NA  3 NA 3.000000    3
4 D NA NA  4 4.000000    4
5 E  9  5  5 6.333333    5