I think I&#39;m looking for an analog of `rbind.fill` (in Hadley&#39;s `plyr` package) for `cbind`. I looked, but there is no `cbind.fill`.

What I want to do is the following:

    #set these just for this example
    one_option &lt;- TRUE
    diff_option &lt;- TRUE

    return_df &lt;- data.frame()

    if (one_option) {
        #do a bunch of calculations, produce a data.frame, for simplicity the following small_df
        small_df &lt;- data.frame(a=1, b=2)
        return_df &lt;- cbind(return_df,small_df)
    }

    if (diff_option) {
        #do a bunch of calculations, produce a data.frame, for simplicity the following small2_df
        small2_df &lt;- data.frame(l=&quot;hi there&quot;, m=44)
        return_df &lt;- cbind(return_df,small2_df)
    }

    return_df

Understandably, this produces an error:

    Error in data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE) : 
    arguments imply differing number of rows: 0, 1

My current fix is to replace the line `return_df &lt;- data.frame()` with `return_df &lt;- data.frame(dummy=1)` and then the code works. I then just remove dummy from the `return_df` at the end. After adding the dummy and running the above code, I get

          dummy a b        l  m
    1     1 1 2 hi there 44

I then just need to get rid of the dummy, e.g.:

    &gt; return_df[,2:ncol(return_df)]
      a b        l  m
    1 1 2 hi there 44

I&#39;m sure I&#39;m missing an easier way to do this.

edit: I guess I&#39;m not looking for a cbind.fill because that would mean that an NA value would be created after the cbind, which is not what I want.

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cbind a dataframe with an empty dataframe - cbind.fill?