Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) : invalid list argument: all variables should have the same length

Sanchit Pruthi picture Sanchit Pruthi · Sep 17, 2017 · Viewed 7k times · Source

I am trying to use "rbind" to get the result but I am being shown an error "Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) : invalid list argument: all variables should have the same length"

pm2 <- function(directory, id=1:322)
{
  files  <- list.files(path = directory, full.names = TRUE)
  df <- data.frame()
  for (i in 1:322)
  {
        fil <- read.csv(files[i])
        df <- rbind(df, fil)
  }
  df2 <- data.frame(matrix(nrow = length(id), ncol = 2))
  colnames(df2) <- c("id", "nobs")
  for(i in id){

        rbind(df2, c(df[[id[i]]],count((df[[id[i]]])),na.rm = TRUE)) 

  }
  df2
}
pm2("specdata", 1:10)

Answer

CPak picture CPak · Sep 17, 2017

It sounds like your individual data frames do not have the same width (number of columns)

An easy fix is to use plyr::rbind.fill which will fill in missing columns with NA (although you might want to rethink why you're rbinding data frames of different widths). See the reproducible example below

test <- mtcars[1:2,]
ncol(test)
# [1] 11

modified <- test[,1:9]
ncol(modified)
# [1] 9

rbind(test, modified)
# Error in rbind(deparse.level, ...) : 
  # numbers of columns of arguments do not match

library(plyr)
rbind.fill(test, modified)
  # mpg cyl disp  hp drat    wt  qsec vs am gear carb
# 1  21   6  160 110  3.9 2.620 16.46  0  1    4    4
# 2  21   6  160 110  3.9 2.875 17.02  0  1    4    4
# 3  21   6  160 110  3.9 2.620 16.46  0  1   NA   NA
# 4  21   6  160 110  3.9 2.875 17.02  0  1   NA   NA