Adding column if it does not exist

Question

I have a bunch of data frames with different variables. I want to read them into R and add columns to those that are short of a few variables so that they all have a common

Answer 1

You can use the rowwise function like this :

library(tidyverse)
mtcars %>%
  tbl_df() %>%
  rownames_to_column("car") %>%
  rowwise() %>%
  mutate(top_speed = ifelse("top_speed" %in% names(.), top_speed, NA),
         mpg = ifelse("mpg" %in% names(.), mpg, NA)) %>%
  select(car, top_speed, mpg, everything())