How to Add a Row To a Data Frame in R

Adding new rows to a data frame is a bit trickier than adding columns. The row must be a data frame and the column names have to match the original data frame.

Code used in this clip:

# Load a data set and break off a row
df = mtcars
row_to_add = df[1,]
row_to_add

# Add the row back to the data set
df = rbind(df, row_to_add)
tail(df)

# Add a new row with given values
new_row = data.frame(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
row.names="new_row")

# Column names must match!
names(new_row) = names(df)
df = rbind(df, new_row)
tail(df)


Code Clips are basic code explanations in 2 minutes or less. They are intended to be short reference guides that provide quick breakdowns and copy/paste access to code needed to accomplish common data science tasks. Think Stack Overflow with a video explanation.


* Note: YouTube does not allow greater than or less than symbols in the text description, so the code above will not be exactly the same as the code shown in the video! For R that means I may use = for assignment and the special Unicode large ＜ and ＞ symbols in place of the standard sized ones for dplyr pipes and comparisons. These special symbols should work as expected for R code on Windows, but may need to be replaced with standard greater than and less than symbols for other operating systems.