Add a value as a new row to a dataframe but keep all other columns NA

July 15, 2022

Here is my sample dataset:

mydata = data.frame (ID =c(1,2,3,4,5),
subject = c("His","Geo","Geo","His","Geo"),
age = c(21,24,26,23,26))

I would like to add a row at the top. I would like it to say "School 1" in the ID column while all other columns remain blank. The following is what I am looking for:

mydata = data.frame (ID =c("School 1",1,2,3,4,5),
subject = c(NA,"His","Geo","Geo","His","Geo"),
age = c(NA,21,24,26,23,26))

I have tried the following, but it ends up populating the value across all columns:

mydata <- rbind(c("School 1"), mydata)

I know the following code will get me what I want, but I would like to avoid having to list out NA’s as my dataset has tons of columns

mydata <- rbind(c("School 1", NA,NA), mydata)

Any help is appreciated!

>Solution :

A possible solution, based on dplyr. We first need to convert ID from numeric to character.

library(dplyr)

mydata %>% 
  mutate(ID = as.character(ID)) %>% 
  bind_rows(list(ID = "School 1"), .)

#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   ID       subject   age
#>   <chr>    <chr>   <dbl>
#> 1 School 1 <NA>       NA
#> 2 1        His        21
#> 3 2        Geo        24
#> 4 3        Geo        26
#> 5 4        His        23
#> 6 5        Geo        26