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

This question didn't specifically address my concerns (outlined here) but in case anyone wants to do this with a parameterized number of columns and no coercion:

> require(dplyr)
> dbNames <- c('a','b','c','d')
> emptyTableOut <- 
    data.frame(
        character(), 
        matrix(integer(), ncol = 3, nrow = 0), stringsAsFactors = FALSE
    ) %>% 
    setNames(nm = c(dbNames))
> glimpse(emptyTableOut)
Observations: 0
Variables: 4
$ a  
$ b  
$ c  
$ d 

As divibisan states on the linked question,

...the reason [coercion] occurs [when cbinding matrices and their constituent types] is that a matrix can only have a single data type. When you cbind 2 matrices, the result is still a matrix and so the variables are all coerced into a single type before converting to a data.frame