R combine data frame columns and transpose into new data frame

Question

I have a series of data frames from which I wish to construct a new data frame in which each row represents one of the original data frames and the columns elements of the row data. ie:

data1 <- c("bill",1,"a","b")
data2 <- c("bob",2,"a","a")
data3 <- c("bert",3,"c","b")
data4 <- c("bill",1,"b","b")
data5 <- c("bob",2,"b","a")
data6 <- c("bert",3,"a","b")


file1 <- rbind(data1,data2,data3)
file2 <- rbind(data4,data5,data6)

whith this model data I would like a data frame such as this:

      bill    bob    bert
file1  a b    a a     c b
file2  b b    b a     a b

where each row represents a file and each column header is a row from these files "bill", "bob", "bert" etc. containing data from the 3rd and 4th columns of the files.

Is there an easy way to achieve this?

Thanks,

Matt

Answer 1

Another way:

z <- list(file1=file1,file2=file2)
res <- t(sapply(z, function(d) paste(d[,3],d[,4])))
colnames(res) <- file1[,1]

res
#        bill  bob   bert 
# file1 "a b" "a a" "c b"
# file2 "b b" "b a" "a b"