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

If you already have a dataframe, you can extract the metadata (column names and types) from a dataframe (e.g. if you are controlling a BUG which is only triggered with certain inputs and need a empty dummy Dataframe):

colums_and_types <- sapply(df, class)

# prints: "c('col1', 'col2')"
print(dput(as.character(names(colums_and_types))))

# prints: "c('integer', 'factor')"
dput(as.character(as.vector(colums_and_types)))

And then use the read.table to create the empty dataframe

read.table(text = "",
   colClasses = c('integer', 'factor'),
   col.names = c('col1', 'col2'))