Row names in data frames: beware of 1:nrow

I spent some time puzzling over row names in data frames in R this morning. It seems that if you make the row names for a data frame, x, as 1:nrow(x), R will act as if you’d not assigned row names, and the names might get changed when you do rbind.

Here’s an illustration:

> x <- data.frame(id=1:3)
> y <- data.frame(id=4:6)
> rownames(x) <- 1:3
> rownames(y) <- LETTERS[4:6]
> rbind(x,y)
  id
1  1
2  2
3  3
D  4
E  5
F  6
> rbind(y,x)
  id
D  4
E  5
F  6
4  1
5  2
6  3

As you can see, if you give x the row names 1:3, these are treated as generic row numbers and could get changed following rbind if they end up in different rows. This doesn’t happen if x and y are matrices.

I often use row names as identifiers, so it seems I must be cautious to use something other than row numbers.