Following a web scrape with RCurl, I've used XML's readHTMLTable and now have a list of 100 dataframes with 40 observations of two variables. I would like to convert this to a single dataframe of 100 rows and 40 columns. The first column in each of the dataframes contains what I would like to become column names in a single dataframe. This is as close as I can get to a MWE (each of the dataframes in my actual list are named NULL):
description <- c("name", "location", "age")
value <- c("mike", "florida", "25")
df1 <- data.frame(description, value)
description <- c("name", "location", "tenure")
value <- c("jim", "new york", "5")
df2 <- data.frame(description, value)
list <- list(df1, df2)
# list output
[[1]]
description value
1 name mike
2 location florida
3 age 25
[[2]]
description value
1 name jim
2 location new york
3 tenure 5
Here is the general output I'm hoping to achieve:
library(reshape2)
listm <- melt(list)
dcast(listm, L1 ~ description)
# dcast output
L1 age location name tenure
1 1 25 florida mike <NA>
2 2 <NA> new york jim 5
My issue, as mentioned above and for which I don't know how to represent via MWE, is the fact that each dataframe is named NULL, and there is accordingly no unique identifier by which to cast the data.
How can I deal with this issue in reshape2 and/or plyr?