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

When a and b are data frames, following should work just fine:

ab <- merge(a, b, by="row.names", all=TRUE)[,-1]

or another possibility:

rows <- unique(c(rownames(a), rownames(b)))
ab <- cbind(a[rows ,], b[rows ,])