Insert Columns with matching values

Question

I have two Data frames. The first one is jobs:

Jobs <- data.frame(Company = c("A","B"), Name = c("Peter","Peter"), Job = c("CEO","Member of the Board"))

The Second one is Media_Appearence:

Media_Appearence <- data.frame(Company = c("A","A","B","B","A","A","A","A"),Name = c("Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter"))

Is there any way, using basic R commands,to insert a new column on Media_Appearence filling it using matching arguments (Checking First two columns anda returning the matching job) ? The desired output would be:

Media_Appearence <- data.frame(Company = c("A","A","B","B","A","A","A","A"),Name = c("Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter"),Job= c("CEO","CEO","Member of the Board","Member of the Board","CEO","CEO","CEO","CEO"))

Already tried to merge but results were messy.

Thanks

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 03 '17 at 16:44

What you want to do is commonly called a "join", "merge" or "appending" data. R wouldn't be much of a language if you couldn't do that!

The field that is matched on is called a "key". In this case, R assumes your key is Company, because it is the only field they have in common.

Jobs <- data.frame(Company = c("A","B"), Name = c("Peter","Peter"), Job = c("CEO","Member of the Board"))

Media_Appearence <- data.frame(Company = c("A","A","B","B","A","A","A","A"),Name = c("Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter","Peter"))

merge(Media_Appearence, Jobs)

  Company  Name                 Job
1       A Peter                 CEO
2       A Peter                 CEO
3       A Peter                 CEO
4       A Peter                 CEO
5       A Peter                 CEO
6       A Peter                 CEO
7       B Peter Member of the Board
8       B Peter Member of the Board

You may have noticed that your data was sorted for you. It was sorted by the default key, which in this case is Company.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 03 '17 at 16:39

1

By using match , would not change the original order of data.frame

Media_Appearence$Job=Jobs$Job[match(Media_Appearence$Company, Jobs$Company)]
Media_Appearence
  Company  Name                 Job
1       A Peter                 CEO
2       A Peter                 CEO
3       B Peter Member of the Board
4       B Peter Member of the Board
5       A Peter                 CEO
6       A Peter                 CEO
7       A Peter                 CEO
8       A Peter                 CEO

answered Oct 03 '17 at 16:39

BENY

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That's another good way – WsnCode Oct 03 '17 at 17:47
I was wondering if the column name had names other than Peter it would work. – WsnCode Oct 03 '17 at 18:04
@Malakias what I usually to do is paste multiple columns to one for your case, Jobs['New']=paste(Jobs$Company,Jobs$name) – BENY Oct 03 '17 at 18:08

Insert Columns with matching values

2 Answers2