Question

I am just starting with R and encountered a strange behaviour: when inserting the first row in an empty data frame, the original column names get lost.

example:

a<-data.frame(one = numeric(0), two = numeric(0))
a
#[1] one two
#<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)
names(a)
#[1] "one" "two"
a<-rbind(a, c(5,6))
a
#  X5 X6
#1  5  6
names(a)
#[1] "X5" "X6"

As you can see, the column names one and two were replaced by X5 and X6.

Could somebody please tell me why this happens and is there a right way to do this without losing column names?

A shotgun solution would be to save the names in an auxiliary vector and then add them back when finished working on the data frame.

Thanks

Context:

I created a function which gathers some data and adds them as a new row to a data frame received as a parameter.
I create the data frame, iterate through my data sources, passing the data.frame to each function call to be filled up with its results.

Answer 1

The rbind help pages specifies that :

For ‘cbind’ (‘rbind’), vectors of zero
length (including ‘NULL’) are ignored
unless the result would have zero rows
(columns), for S compatibility.
(Zero-extent matrices do not occur in
S3 and are not ignored in R.)

So, in fact, a is ignored in your rbind instruction. Not totally ignored, it seems, because as it is a data frame the rbind function is called as rbind.data.frame :

rbind.data.frame(c(5,6))
#  X5 X6
#1  5  6

Maybe one way to insert the row could be :

a[nrow(a)+1,] <- c(5,6)
a
#  one two
#1   5   6

But there may be a better way to do it depending on your code.