How do I add rows to a data frame using sapply?

Question

I\'m trying to add rows to a data frame within an sapply function call, but it\'s returning a matrix, whereas I want a data frame with variables in the columns and names/address

Answer 1

sapply is attempting to simplify the result to matrix and you are not getting the output you expect.

From "simplify" parameter in apply:

logical or character string; should the result be simplified to a vector, matrix or higher dimensional array if possible?

Since sapply is a wrapper for lapply to simplify the output, try creating the data frames with lapply directly.

The popular function call do.call(rbind, <list>) combines the elements of a list.

absdf <- lapply(idvs, function(idv) {

    name <- paste("John Doe", idv)
    address <- "123 Main St."
    city <- "Elmhurst"

    data.frame(
        name = name, 
        address = address,
        city = city,
        stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

})
do.call(rbind, absdf)
#           name      address     city
# 1 John Doe 123 123 Main St. Elmhurst
# 2 John Doe 465 123 Main St. Elmhurst