Assign value to group based on condition in column

Question

I have a data frame that looks like the following:

> df = data.frame(group = c(1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3), 
                 date = c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9),
                 


        

Answer 1

One more base R path:

df$newValue <- ave(`names<-`(df$value==4,df$date), df$group, FUN=function(x) as.numeric(names(x)[x]))
df
   group date value newValue
1      1    1     3        2
2      1    2     4        2
3      1    3     3        2
4      2    4     4        4
5      2    5     5        4
6      2    6     6        4
7      3    7     6        8
8      3    8     4        8
9      3    9     9        8
10     3   11     7        8

I used a test on variable length groups. I assigned the date column as the names for the logical index of value equal to 4. Then identify the value by group.

Data

df = data.frame(group = c(1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,3), 
                 date = c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11),
                 value = c(3,4,3,4,5,6,6,4,9,7))