Combine two data frames by rows (rbind) when they have different sets of columns

Is it possible to row bind two data frames that don't have the same set of columns? I am hoping to retain the columns that do not match after the bind.

rbind.fill from the package plyr might be what you are looking for.

A more recent solution is to use dplyr's bind_rows function which I assume is more efficient than smartbind.

df1 <- data.frame(a = c(1:5), b = c(6:10))
df2 <- data.frame(a = c(11:15), b = c(16:20), c = LETTERS[1:5])
dplyr::bind_rows(df1, df2)
    a  b    c
1   1  6 <NA>
2   2  7 <NA>
3   3  8 <NA>
4   4  9 <NA>
5   5 10 <NA>
6  11 16    A
7  12 17    B
8  13 18    C
9  14 19    D
10 15 20    E