R: Merging lists of data frames - r

Question

I'm a total noob at R and I've tried (and retried) to search for an answer to the following problem, but I've not been able to get any of the proposed solutions to do what I'm interested in.
I have two lists of named elements, with each element pointing to data frames with identical layouts:
(EDIT)
df1 <- data.frame(A=c(1,2,3),B=c("A","B","C"))
df2 <- data.frame(A=c(98,99),B=c("Y","Z"))
lst1 <- c(X=df1,Y=df2)
df3 <- data.frame(A=c(4,5),B=c("D","E"))
lst2 <- c(X=df3)
(EDIT 2)
So it seems like storing multiple data frames in a list is a bad idea, as it will convert the data frames to lists. So I'll go out looking for an alternative way to store a set of named data frames.
In general the names of the elements in the two elements might overlap partially, completely, or not at all.
I'm looking for a way to merge the two lists into a single list:
<some-function-sequence>(lst1, lst2)
->
c(X=rbind(df1,df3),Y=df2)
-resulting in something like this:
[EDIT: Syntax changed to correctly reflect desired result (list-of-data frames)]
$X
A B
1 1 A
2 2 B
3 3 C
4 4 D
5 5 E
$X.B
A B
1 98 Y
2 99 Z
I.e:
IF the lists contain identical element names, each pointing to a data frame, THEN I want to 'rbind' the rows from these two data frames and assign the resulting data frame to the same element name in the resulting list.
Otherwise the element names and data frames from both lists should just be copied into the resulting list.
I've tried the solutions from a number of discussions such as:
Can I combine a list of similar dataframes into a single dataframe?
Combine/merge lists by elements names
Simultaneously merge multiple data.frames in a list
Combine/merge lists by elements names (list in list)
Convert a list of data frames into one data frame
-but I've not been able to find the right solution. A general problem seems to be that the data frame ends up being converted into a list by the application of 'mapply/sapply/merge/...' - and usually also sliced and/or merged in ways which I am not interested in. :)
Any help with this will be much appreciated!
[SOLUTION]
The solution seems to be to change the use of c(...) when collecting data frames to list(...) after which the solution proposed by Pierre seems to give the desired result.

Answer 1

Here is a proposed solution using split and c to combine like terms. Please read the caveat at the bottom:
s <- split(c(lst1, lst2), names(c(lst1,lst2)))
lapply(s, function(lst) do.call(function(...) unname(c(...)), lst))
# $X.A
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5
#
# $X.B
# [1] "A" "B" "C" "D" "E"
#
# $Y.A
# [1] 98 99
#
# $Y.B
# [1] "Y" "Z"
This solution is based on NOT having factors as strings. It will not throw an error but the factors will be converted to numbers. Below I show how I transformed the data to remove factors. Let me know if you require factors:
df1 <- data.frame(A=c(1,2,3),B=c("A","B","C"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
df2 <- data.frame(A=c(98,99),B=c("Y","Z"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
lst1 <- c(X=df1,Y=df2)
df3 <- data.frame(A=c(4,5),B=c("D","E"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
lst2 <- c(X=df3)
If the data is stored in lists we can use:
lapply(split(c(lst1, lst2), names(c(lst1,lst2))), function(lst) do.call(rbind, lst))

Answer 2

The following solution is probably not the most efficient way. However, if I got your problem right this should work ;)
# Example data
# Some vectors
a <- 1:5
b <- 3:7
c <- rep(5, 5)
d <- 5:1
# Some dataframes, data1 and data3 have identical column names
data1 <- data.frame(a, b)
data2 <- data.frame(c, b)
data3 <- data.frame(a, b)
data4 <- data.frame(c, d)
# 2 lists
list1 <- list(data1, data2)
list2 <- list(data3, data4)
# Loop, wich checks for the dataframe names and rbinds dataframes with the same column names
final_list <- list1
used_lists <- numeric()
for(i in 1:length(list1)) {
for(j in 1:length(list2)) {
if(sum(colnames(list1[[i]]) == colnames(list2[[j]])) == ncol(list1[[i]])) {
final_list[[i]] <- rbind(list1[[i]], list2[[j]])
used_lists <- c(used_lists, j)
}
}
}
# Adding the other dataframes, which did not have the same column names
for(i in 1:length(list2)) {
if((i %in% used_lists) == FALSE) {
final_list[[length(final_list) + 1]] <- list2[[i]]
}
}
# Final list, which includes all other lists
final_list