Find which interval row in a data frame that each element of a vector belongs in

Question

I have a vector of numeric elements, and a dataframe with two columns that define the start and end points of intervals. Each row in the dataframe is one interval. I want to

Answer 1

Here is kind of a "one-liner" which (mis-)uses foverlaps from the data.table package but David's non-equi join is still more concise:

library(data.table) #v1.10.0
foverlaps(data.table(start = elements, end = elements), 
          setDT(intervals, key = c("start", "end")))
#   phase start end i.start i.end
#1:     a     0 0.5     0.1   0.1
#2:     a     0 0.5     0.2   0.2
#3:     a     0 0.5     0.5   0.5
#4:    NA    NA  NA     0.9   0.9
#5:     b     1 1.9     1.1   1.1
#6:     b     1 1.9     1.9   1.9
#7:     c     2 2.5     2.1   2.1