Compare if two dataframe objects in R are equal?
It is not clear what it means to test if two data frames are "value equal" but to test if the values are the same, here is an example of two non-identical dataframes with equal values:
a <- data.frame(x = 1:10)b <- data.frame(y = 1:10)To test if all values are equal:
all(a == b) # TRUETo test if objects are identical (they are not, they have different column names):
identical(a,b) # FALSE: class, colnames, rownames must all match.
We can use the R package compare to test whether the names of the object and the values are the same, in just one step.
a <- data.frame(x = 1:10)b <- data.frame(y = 1:10)library(compare)compare(a, b)#FALSE [TRUE]#objects are not identical (different names), but values are the same.In case we only care about equality of the values, we can set ignoreNames=TRUE
compare(a, b, ignoreNames=T)#TRUE# dropped namesThe package has additional interesting functions such as compareEqual and compareIdentical.