rbind error: “names do not match previous names”

Question

As part of a larger problem (adding a ,makeUniqueIDs argument to rbind.SpatialPolygonsDataFrame for situations when the polygon IDs are identical),

Answer 1

The names of the first dataframe do not match the names of the second one. Just as the error message says.

> identical(names(xd.small[[1]]), names(xd.small[[2]]) )
[1] FALSE

If you do not care about the names of the 3rd or 4th columns of the second df, you can coerce them to be the same:

> names(xd.small[[1]]) <- names(xd.small[[2]]) 
> identical(names(xd.small[[1]]), names(xd.small[[2]]) )
[1] TRUE

Then things should proceed happily.