Adding an index column representing a repetition of a dataframe in R - r

Question

I have a dataframe in R that I'd like to repeat several times, and I want to add in a new variable to index those repetitions. The best I've come up with is using mutate + rbind over and over, and I feel like there has to be an efficient dataframe method I could be using here.
Here's an example: df <- data.frame(x = 1:3, y = letters[1:3]) gives us the dataframe
x
y
1
a
2
b
3
c
I'd like to repeat that say 3 times, with an index that looks like this:
x
y
index
1
a
1
2
b
1
3
c
1
1
a
2
2
b
2
3
c
2
1
a
3
2
b
3
3
c
3
Using the rep function, I can get the first two columns, but not the index column. The best I've come up with so far (using dplyr) is:
df2 <-
df %>%
mutate(index = 1) %>%
rbind(df %>% mutate(index = 2)) %>%
rbind(df %>% mutate(index = 3))
This obviously doesn't work if I need to repeat my dataframe more than a handful of times. It feels like the kind of thing that should be easy to do using dataframe methods, but I haven't been able to find anything.
Grateful for any tips!

Answer 1

You can use this code for as many data frames as you would like. You just have to set the n argument:
replicate function takes 2 main arguments. We first specify the number of time we would like to reproduce our data set by n. Then we specify our data set as expr argument. The result would be a list whose elements are instances of our data set
After that we pass it along to imap function from purrr package to define the unique id for each of our data set. .x represents each element of our list (here a data frame) and .y is the position of that element which amounts to the number of instances we created. So for example we assign value 1 to the first id column of the first data set as .y is equal to 1 for that and so on.
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
replicate(3, df, simplify = FALSE) %>%
imap_dfr(~ .x %>%
mutate(id = .y))
x y id
1 1 a 1
2 2 b 1
3 3 c 1
4 1 a 2
5 2 b 2
6 3 c 2
7 1 a 3
8 2 b 3
9 3 c 3
In base R you can use the following code:
do.call(rbind,
mapply(function(x, z) {
x$id <- z
x
}, replicate(3, df, simplify = FALSE), 1:3, SIMPLIFY = FALSE))
x y id
1 1 a 1
2 2 b 1
3 3 c 1
4 1 a 2
5 2 b 2
6 3 c 2
7 1 a 3
8 2 b 3
9 3 c 3

Answer 2

You can use rerun to repeat the dataframe n times and add an index column using bind_rows -
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
n <- 3
df <- data.frame(x = 1:3, y = letters[1:3])
bind_rows(rerun(n, df), .id = 'index')
# index x y
#1 1 1 a
#2 1 2 b
#3 1 3 c
#4 2 1 a
#5 2 2 b
#6 2 3 c
#7 3 1 a
#8 3 2 b
#9 3 3 c
In base R, we can repeat the row index 3 times.
transform(df[rep(1:nrow(df), n), ], index = rep(1:n, each = nrow(df)))

Answer 3

One more way
n <- 3
map_dfr(seq_len(n), ~ df %>% mutate(index = .x))
x y index
1 1 a 1
2 2 b 1
3 3 c 1
4 1 a 2
5 2 b 2
6 3 c 2
7 1 a 3
8 2 b 3
9 3 c 3