Dataquest : How to Create a Dataframe in R with 30 Code Examples (2023)

A DataFrame in R is a tabular (i.e., 2-dimensional, rectangular) data structure used to store values of any data type. It's a data structure of the base R, meaning that we don't have to install any specific package to create DataFrames and work with it.

As with any other table, every DataFrame consists of columns (representing variables, or attributes) and rows (representing data entries). Speaking in terms of R, a dataframe is a list of vectors of equal length, and, being at the same time a 2-dimensional data structure, it resembles an R matrix differing from it in the following way: a matrix has to contain only one data type while a DataFrame is more versatile since it can have multiple data types. However, while different columns of a DataFrame can have different data types, each column should be of the same data type.

To create a DataFrame in R from one or more vectors of the same length, we use the data.frame() function. Its most basic syntax is as follows: