cbind a dataframe with an empty dataframe - cbind.fill?

Question

I think I\'m looking for an analog of rbind.fill (in Hadley\'s plyr package) for cbind. I looked, but there is no cbind.fill

Answer 1

I just find a trick that when we want to add columns into an empty dataframe, just rbind it at first time, than cbind it later.

    newdf <- data.frame()
    # add the first column
    newdf <- rbind(newdf,data.frame("col1"=c("row1"=1,"row2"=2)))
    # add the second column
    newdf <- cbind(newdf,data.frame("col2"=c("row1"=3,"row2"=4)))
    # add more columns
    newdf <- cbind(newdf,data.frame("col3"=c("row1"=5,"row2"=6)))
    # result
    #     col1 col2 col3
    #row1    1    3    5
    #row2    2    4    6

I don't know why, but it works for me.