Create an empty data.frame

Question

I\'m trying to initialize a data.frame without any rows. Basically, I want to specify the data types for each column and name them, but not have any rows created as a result

Answer 1

You could use read.table with an empty string for the input text as follows:

colClasses = c("Date", "character", "character")
col.names = c("Date", "File", "User")

df <- read.table(text = "",
                 colClasses = colClasses,
                 col.names = col.names)

Alternatively specifying the col.names as a string:

df <- read.csv(text="Date,File,User", colClasses = colClasses)

Thanks to Richard Scriven for the improvement