[FIXED] How to join a dataset by row index?

Issue

I have one dataset that looks like this

Rownumber	Name
5	John
7	Ken
9	Marvin

I have another that looks like this

LastName
Ming
Roe
Martin
Hugo
Sawyer
Wallace
Thomas
Wang
Abdul

Note that I want to join second dataset to first. In the first I have a column called row number and the second I don't, but I have a backend index.

I would like my dataset to look like this

Rownumber	Name	Last name
5	John	Sawyer
7	Ken	Thomas
9	Marvin	Abdul

You see that in the second dataset Sawyer is the 5th row, Thomas is the 7th, and Abdul is the 9th that is way it merged.

Solution

Suppose your data are stored in two data.frames named df and df2, you could use a dplyr join:

library(dplyr)
df2 %>% 
  mutate(Rownumber = row_number()) %>% 
  right_join(df, by = "Rownumber") %>% 
  select(Rownumber, Name, LastName)

This returns

  Rownumber   Name LastName
1         5   John   Sawyer
2         7    Ken   Thomas
3         9 Marvin    Abdul

• First create row numbers for your data.frame containing the last names.
• Next right_join the first data.frame by Rownumber.

Data

df <- structure(list(Rownumber = c(5, 7, 9), Name = c("John", "Ken", 
"Marvin")), row.names = c(NA, -3L), class = "data.frame")

df2 <- structure(list(LastName = c("Ming", "Roe", "Martin", "Hugo", 
"Sawyer", "Wallace", "Thomas", "Wang", "Abdul")), row.names = c(NA, 
-9L), class = "data.frame")

Answered By - Martin Gal

Answer Checked By - Dawn Plyler (PHPFixing Volunteer)