paste several column values into one value in R

Question

I have a really simple question that I cannot find a straightforward answer for. I have a data.frame that looks like this:

df3 <- data.frame(x=c(1:10),y=c(5:14),z=c(25:34))

ID  x  y  z
1   1  5 25
2   2  6 26
3   3  7 27
etc.

And I want to 'paste' together the different values in each column so that they form a single, combined value, as in:

ID x+y+z
1  1525
2  2626
3  3727

I'm sure that this is very easy to do, but I just don't know how!

Answer 1

Yep, paste() is exactly what you want to do:

 df3$xyz <- with(df3, paste(x,y,z, sep=""))

 # Or, if you want the result to be numeric, rather than character
 df3$xyz <- as.numeric(with(df3, paste(x,y,z, sep="")))