Merge multiple data frames with `multiMerge`

Merging multiple data frames in R is anything but straightforward and usually involves confusing loop structures. `multiMerge` elegantly avoids such bewildering code chunks by invoking `Reduce` upon a list of data frames. The function also features a set of auxiliary parameters that are passed on to `merge`. Note that the code is mainly taken from a related blog post in StackOverflow.

    ## sample data
    set.seed(10)
    ls_df <- list(data.frame(a = 1:10, b = 1:10),
                  data.frame(a = 5:14, c = 11:20),
                  data.frame(a = sample(20, 10), d = runif(10)))

    ## merge data frames in one go
    merge(ls_df, by = "a", all = TRUE)

    ##     a  b  c          d
    ## 1   1  1 NA         NA
    ## 2   2  2 NA         NA
    ## 3   3  3 NA 0.86472123
    ## 4   4  4 NA         NA
    ## 5   5  5 11         NA
    ## 6   6  6 12 0.39879073
    ## 7   7  7 13 0.05190332
    ## 8   8  8 14 0.26417767
    ## 9   9  9 15 0.11350898
    ## 10 10 10 16 0.59592531
    ## 11 11 NA 17 0.56773775
    ## 12 12 NA 18 0.42880942
    ## 13 13 NA 19         NA
    ## 14 14 NA 20         NA
    ## 15 15 NA NA 0.83613414
    ## 16 16 NA NA 0.35804998