Create a Data Frame of Unequal Lengths

Question

While data frame columns must have the same number rows, is there any way to create a data frame of unequal lengths. I\'m not interested in saving them as separate elements

Answer 1

Another approach to the padding:

na.pad <- function(x,len){
    x[1:len]
}

makePaddedDataFrame <- function(l,...){
    maxlen <- max(sapply(l,length))
    data.frame(lapply(l,na.pad,len=maxlen),...)
}

x = c(rep("one",2))
y = c(rep("two",10))
z = c(rep("three",5))

makePaddedDataFrame(list(x=x,y=y,z=z))

The na.pad() function exploits the fact that R will automatically pad a vector with NAs if you try to index non-existent elements.

makePaddedDataFrame() just finds the longest one and pads the rest up to a matching length.