R: Insert and fill missing periods in panel data - r

Question

I'm trying to learn R coming from Stata, but have run into the following two problems which I cannot seem to find elegant solutions for in R:
1) I have a panel dataset with gaps in my time variable. I would like to expand my time variable to include the gaps despite having no observed data for these rows.
In Stata I would usually go about this by setting my ID and time variables with xtset and then expanding the dataset based on this with tsfill. Is there an equivalently elegant way in R?
2) I would like to fill some of the new, blank cells with data for constant variables.
In Stata I would do this by copying data from previous (relative to my time variable) observations using the l.-prefix; for example using replace Con = l.Con.
In other words I'm asking how to go from something like this:
ID Time Num Con
1 Jan 10 A
1 Feb 15 A
1 May 20 A
2 Feb 12 B
2 Mar 14 B
2 Jun 15 B
To something like this:
ID Time Num Con
1 Jan 10 A
1 Feb 15 A
1 Mar A
1 Apr A
1 May 20 A
2 Feb 12 B
2 Mar 14 B
2 Apr B
2 May B
2 Jun 15 B
Hopefully that makes sense. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can try merge from base R or the data.table join
library(data.table)
DT2 <- setDT(df1)[, {tmp <- match(Time, month.abb)
list(Time=month.abb[min(tmp):max(tmp)])}, .(ID,Con)]
setkey(df1[, c(1,4,2,3), with=FALSE], ID, Con, Time)[DT2]
# ID Con Time Num
# 1: 1 A Jan 10
# 2: 1 A Feb 15
# 3: 1 A Mar NA
# 4: 1 A Apr NA
# 5: 1 A May 20
# 6: 2 B Feb 12
# 7: 2 B Mar 14
# 8: 2 B Apr NA
# 9: 2 B May NA
#10: 2 B Jun 15
NOTE: It may be better to keep missing value as NA