By using the merge
function and its optional parameters:
Inner join: merge(df1, df2)
will work for these examples because R automatically joins the frames by common variable names, but you would most likely want to specify merge(df1, df2, by = "CustomerId")
to make sure that you were matching on only the fields you desired. You can also use the by.x
and by.y
parameters if the matching variables have different names in the different data frames.
Outer join: merge(x = df1, y = df2, by = "CustomerId", all = TRUE)
Left outer: merge(x = df1, y = df2, by = "CustomerId", all.x = TRUE)
Right outer: merge(x = df1, y = df2, by = "CustomerId", all.y = TRUE)
Cross join: merge(x = df1, y = df2, by = NULL)
Just as with the inner join, you would probably want to explicitly pass "CustomerId" to R as the matching variable. I think it's almost always best to explicitly state the identifiers on which you want to merge; it's safer if the input data.frames change unexpectedly and easier to read later on.
You can merge on multiple columns by giving by
a vector, e.g., by = c("CustomerId", "OrderId")
.
If the column names to merge on are not the same, you can specify, e.g., by.x = "CustomerId_in_df1", by.y = "CustomerId_in_df2"
where CustomerId_in_df1
is the name of the column in the first data frame and CustomerId_in_df2
is the name of the column in the second data frame. (These can also be vectors if you need to merge on multiple columns.)
Best Answer
You can subset using a vector of column names. I strongly prefer this approach over those that treat column names as if they are object names (e.g.
subset()
), especially when programming in functions, packages, or applications.Note there's no comma (i.e. it's not
df[,c("A","B","C")]
). That's becausedf[,"A"]
returns a vector, not a data frame. Butdf["A"]
will always return a data frame.Thanks to David Dorchies for pointing out that
df[,"A"]
returns a vector instead of a data.frame, and to Antoine Fabri for suggesting a better alternative (above) to my original solution (below).