Learn R – 5 Techniques to Create Empty Data Frames with Column Names

5 Techniques to Create Empty Data Frames

In each of the examples below, the data frame is created with three columns, namely, ‘name’, ‘rating’, ‘relyear’. It represents moview names, ratings, and the release year.

# Command data.frame is used
df1 <- data.frame(name="", rating="", relyear="", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
# Command data.frame is used
df2 <- data.frame(name=character(), rating=character(), relyear=character(), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
# Usage of read.table command to create empty data frame
df3 <- read.table(text = "",
           colClasses = c("character", "character", "character"),
           col.names = c("name", "rating", "relyear"))

# Usage of read.csv command to create empty data frame
df4 <- read.csv(text="name, rating, relyear")
# Command data.frame is used
df5 = data.frame(matrix(vector(), 0, 3, dimnames=list(c(), c("name", "rating", "relyear"))), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

You could test the above by assigning a row to the created data frame. Following is the related code sample to assign a row to the empty data frame.

 df1[1,] <- c("Furious 7", "5", "2015")