Add New Row at Specific Index Position to Data Frame in R (Example)
This tutorial shows how to insert a new data frame row at a certain row index in the R programming language.
The post is structured as follows:
Sound good? Here’s the step-by-step process…
Construction of Example Data
We’ll use the following data as basement for this R tutorial:
data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:5, # Create example data x2 = 11:15, x3 = 21:25) data # Print example data # x1 x2 x3 # 1 1 11 21 # 2 2 12 22 # 3 3 13 23 # 4 4 14 24 # 5 5 15 25
As you can see based on the previously shown output of the RStudio console, our example data consists of five rows and three columns.
Let’s also create a vector object that we will use as new row:
new_row <- c(9, 99, 999) # Create example row new_row # Print example row # 9 99 999
Our new row vector contains three numeric values.
Example: Adding New Row at Certain Position of Data Frame Using rbind() Function
In this Example, I’ll show how to insert a new row to a data frame at a specific row index using the rbind function.
Consider the following R code:
data_new <- rbind(data[1:3, ], # Applying rbind function new_row, data[- (1:3), ]) data_new # Print new data frame # x1 x2 x3 # 1 1 11 21 # 2 2 12 22 # 3 3 13 23 # 4 9 99 999 # 41 4 14 24 # 5 5 15 25
As you can see, we have added our new row after the third index position of our data. You may modify the value 3 in the previous R code to use other row-indices.
The previous R code messed up the row names of our data frame. We may modify the row names of our new data to range from 1 to the number of rows of our data as shown below:
rownames(data_new) <- 1:nrow(data_new) # Modify row names data_new # Print data with updated row names # x1 x2 x3 # 1 1 11 21 # 2 2 12 22 # 3 3 13 23 # 4 9 99 999 # 5 4 14 24 # 6 5 15 25
Note that the rbind function can be relatively slow when applied to large data sets. If you are looking for faster solutions, please have a look here.
Video, Further Resources & Summary
I have recently published a video on my YouTube channel, which explains the examples of this article. You can find the video below:
Furthermore, you may want to have a look at the other articles of this homepage:
- Add New Row to Data Frame
- Add New Column to Data Frame in R
- Append to Data Frame in Loop in R
- All R Programming Tutorials
On this page, I explained how to append new rows at a specific position of a data frame in R programming. Let me know in the comments, in case you have further questions. Furthermore, please subscribe to my email newsletter in order to get regular updates on new tutorials.