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

If you want to stick with base,

data <- data.frame('a' = c('A','B','C','D','E'),'x' = c(1,2,NA,NA,NA),'y' = c(NA,NA,3,NA,NA),'z' = c(NA,NA,NA,4,5))
data[is.na(data)]<-","
data$mycol<-paste0(data$x,data$y,data$z)
data$mycol <- gsub(',','',data$mycol)