How to combine multiple character columns into a single column in an R data frame

Question

I am working with Census data and I need to combine four character columns into a single column.

Example:

LOGRECNO STATE COUNTY  TRACT BLOCK
    60           


        

Answer 1

Or try this

DF$BLOCKID <-
  paste(DF$LOGRECNO, DF$STATE, DF$COUNTY, 
        DF$TRACT, DF$BLOCK, sep = "")

(Here is a method to set up the dataframe for people coming into this discussion later)

DF <- 
  data.frame(LOGRECNO = c(60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65),
             STATE = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1),
             COUNTY = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1), 
             TRACT = c(21100, 21100, 21100, 21100, 21100, 21100), 
             BLOCK = c(1053, 1054, 1055, 1056, 1057, 1058))