Nested ifelse statement

Question

I\'m still learning how to translate a SAS code into R and I get warnings. I need to understand where I\'m making mistakes. What I want to do is create a variable which summ

Answer 1

If the data set contains many rows it might be more efficient to join with a lookup table using data.table instead of nested ifelse().

Provided the lookup table below

lookup

     idnat     idbp   idnat2
1:  french mainland mainland
2:  french   colony overseas
3:  french overseas overseas
4: foreign  foreign  foreign

and a sample data set

library(data.table)
n_row <- 10L
set.seed(1L)
DT <- data.table(idnat = "french",
                 idbp = sample(c("mainland", "colony", "overseas", "foreign"), n_row, replace = TRUE))
DT[idbp == "foreign", idnat := "foreign"][]

      idnat     idbp
 1:  french   colony
 2:  french   colony
 3:  french overseas
 4: foreign  foreign
 5:  french mainland
 6: foreign  foreign
 7: foreign  foreign
 8:  french overseas
 9:  french overseas
10:  french mainland

then we can do an update while joining:

DT[lookup, on = .(idnat, idbp), idnat2 := i.idnat2][]

      idnat     idbp   idnat2
 1:  french   colony overseas
 2:  french   colony overseas
 3:  french overseas overseas
 4: foreign  foreign  foreign
 5:  french mainland mainland
 6: foreign  foreign  foreign
 7: foreign  foreign  foreign
 8:  french overseas overseas
 9:  french overseas overseas
10:  french mainland mainland