I have a problem when combining the following vectors included in the list:
x <- list(as.numeric(c(1,4)),as.numeric(c(3,19,11)))
names (x[[1]]) <- c(\"spec
You need to give R a bit more help, by first preparing the particular vectors, all of the same length, that you eventually want to cbind
together. Otherwise (as you've seen) R uses its usual recycling rules to fill out the matrix.
Try something like this:
spp <- paste("species", c("A", "B", "C"), sep=".")
x2 <- lapply(x, FUN=function(X) X[spp])
mat <- do.call("cbind", x2)
row.names(mat) <- spp
mat
[,1] [,2]
species.A 1 3
species.B NA 19
species.C 4 11
EDIT: As Brian mentions in comments, this could be made a bit more compact (but at the expense of some readability). Which one you use is just a matter of taste:
mat <- do.call("cbind", lapply(x, "[", spp))
row.names(mat) <- spp
It looks like you're actually trying to do a merge. As such, merge
will work. You just have to tell it to merge on the names, and to keep all rows.
do.call(merge, c(x, by=0, all=TRUE)) # by=0 and by="row.names" are the same
(This will create a data frame rather than a matrix, but for most purposes that shouldn't be an issue.)
merge(x = x[[1]], y = x[[2]], by = "names", all.y = TRUE)