Simultaneously merge multiple data.frames in a list

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I have a list of many data.frames that I want to merge. The issue here is that each data.frame differs in terms of the number of rows and columns, but they all share the key variables (which I’ve called "var1" and "var2" in the code below). If the data.frames were identical in terms of columns, I could merely rbind, for which plyr’s rbind.fill would do the job, but that’s not the case with these data.

Because the merge command only works on 2 data.frames, I turned to the Internet for ideas. I got this one from here, which worked perfectly in R 2.7.2, which is what I had at the time:

merge.rec <- function(.list, ...){
    if(length(.list)==1) return(.list[[1]])
    Recall(c(list(merge(.list[[1]], .list[[2]], ...)), .list[-(1:2)]), ...)
}

And I would call the function like so:

df <- merge.rec(my.list, by.x = c("var1", "var2"), 
                by.y = c("var1", "var2"), all = T, suffixes=c("", ""))

But in any R version after 2.7.2, including 2.11 and 2.12, this code fails with the following error:

Error in match.names(clabs, names(xi)) : 
  names do not match previous names

(Incidently, I see other references to this error elsewhere with no resolution).

Is there any way to solve this?

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