I want to replace the NA value in dfABy from the column A, with the value from the column B, based on the year of column year. For example, my df is:
Perhaps the easiest to read/understand answer in R lexicon is to use ifelse. So borrowing Richard's dataframe we could do:
df <- structure(list(A = c(56L, NA, NA, 67L, NA),
B = c(75L, 45L, 77L, 41L, 65L),
Year = c(1921L, 1921L, 1922L, 1923L, 1923L)),.Names = c("A",
"B", "Year"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -5L))
df$A <- ifelse(is.na(df$A), df$B, df$A)