cbind 2 dataframes with different number of rows

Question

I have two lists named h and g. They each contain 244 dataframes and they look like the following:

h[[1]]
   year  avg    hr   sal
         


        

Answer 1

I think you should instead use merge:

merge(df1, df2, by="year", all = T)

For your data:

df1 = data.frame(matrix(0, 7, 4))
names(df1) = c("year", "avg", "hr", "sal")
df1$year = 2010:2016
df1$avg = c(.3, .29, .275, .280, .295, .33, .315)
df1$hr = c(31, 30, 14, 24, 18, 26, 40)
df1$sal = c(2000, 4000, 600, 800, 1000, 7000, 9000)
df2 = data.frame(matrix(0, 5, 3))
names(df2) = c("year", "pos", "fld")
df2$year = c(2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015)
df2$pos = c('A', 'B', 'C', 'B', 'D')
df2$fld = c(.99,.995,.97,.98,.99)

cbind is meant to column-bind two dataframes that are in all sense compatible. But what you aim to do is actual merge, where you want the elements from the two data frames not be discarded, and for missing values you get NA instead.