Combine (rbind) data frames and create column with name of original data frames

Question

I have several data frames that I want to combine by row. In the resulting single data frame, I want to create a new variable identifying which data set the observation came

Answer 1

It's not exactly what you asked for, but it's pretty close. Put your objects in a named list and use do.call(rbind...)

> do.call(rbind, list(df1 = df1, df2 = df2))
      x y
df1.1 1 2
df1.2 3 4
df2.1 5 6
df2.2 7 8

Notice that the row names now reflect the source data.frames.

Update: Use cbind and rbind

Another option is to make a basic function like the following:

AppendMe <- function(dfNames) {
  do.call(rbind, lapply(dfNames, function(x) {
    cbind(get(x), source = x)
  }))
}

This function then takes a character vector of the data.frame names that you want to "stack", as follows:

> AppendMe(c("df1", "df2"))
  x y source
1 1 2    df1
2 3 4    df1
3 5 6    df2
4 7 8    df2

Update 2: Use combine from the "gdata" package

> library(gdata)
> combine(df1, df2)
  x y source
1 1 2    df1
2 3 4    df1
3 5 6    df2
4 7 8    df2

Update 3: Use rbindlist from "data.table"

Another approach that can be used now is to use rbindlist from "data.table" and its idcol argument. With that, the approach could be:

> rbindlist(mget(ls(pattern = "df\\d+")), idcol = TRUE)
   .id x y
1: df1 1 2
2: df1 3 4
3: df2 5 6
4: df2 7 8

Update 4: use map_df from "purrr"

Similar to rbindlist, you can also use map_df from "purrr" with I or c as the function to apply to each list element.

> mget(ls(pattern = "df\\d+")) %>% map_df(I, .id = "src")
Source: local data frame [4 x 3]

    src     x     y
  (chr) (int) (int)
1   df1     1     2
2   df1     3     4
3   df2     5     6
4   df2     7     8