Combining time series data into a single data frame

Question

I have multiple data frames that look like this:

> head(Standard.df)
   Count.S       Date      Month       Week       Year
552     15 2008-01-01 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
594     11 2008-01-02 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
1049    10 2008-01-03 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
511     12 2008-01-04 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
717     10 2008-01-06 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
1744     3 2008-01-07 2008-01-01 2008-01-07 2008-01-01

> head(Guardian.df)
     Count.G       Date      Month       Week       Year
2624       7 2006-01-02 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
409       13 2006-01-03 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
93        13 2006-01-04 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
999       20 2006-01-05 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
1387      19 2006-01-06 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
2652       4 2006-01-07 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
2652       4 2006-01-07 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01

> head(Welt.df)
     Count.W       Date      Month       Week       Year
2506       9 2006-01-02 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
384       12 2006-01-03 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
87        15 2006-01-04 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
947        6 2006-01-05 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
1313      19 2006-01-06 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01
2532      16 2006-01-07 2006-01-01 2006-01-02 2006-01-01

The vectors representing time are of different lengths in all data frames (some are 10 years, some are 8, and so on). Ideally I would like to combine the Count vectors from all the data frames into one and have the longest time vector as a starting point, and if there are no corresponding dates in other data frames – fill in the NAs

So, something like this:

> head(Full.df)
Count.G   Count.W   Count.S       Date      Month       Week       Year
    x         x          15 2008-01-01 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
    x         x          11 2008-01-02 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
    x         x          10 2008-01-03 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
    x         x          12 2008-01-04 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
    x         x          10 2008-01-06 2008-01-01 2007-12-31 2008-01-01
    x         x           3 2008-01-07 2008-01-01 2008-01-07 2008-01-01

Is this possible to do in R?

Answer 1

You can try

Reduce(function(...) merge(..., by=c('Date', 'Month', 'Week', 'Year'), 
        all=TRUE), list(Standard.df, Guardian.df, Welt.df))