How to do vlookup and fill down (like in Excel) in R?

Question

I have a dataset about 105000 rows and 30 columns. I have a categorical variable that I would like to assign it to a number. In Excel, I would probably do something with

Answer 1

I also like using qdapTools::lookup or shorthand binary operator %l%. It works identically to an Excel vlookup, but it accepts name arguments opposed to column numbers

## Replicate Ben's data:
hous <- structure(list(HouseType = c("Semi", "Single", "Row", "Single", 
    "Apartment", "Apartment", "Row"), HouseTypeNo = c(1L, 2L, 3L, 
    2L, 4L, 4L, 3L)), .Names = c("HouseType", "HouseTypeNo"), 
    class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -7L))


largetable <- data.frame(HouseType = as.character(sample(unique(hous$HouseType), 
    1000, replace = TRUE)), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)


## It's this simple:
library(qdapTools)
largetable[, 1] %l% hous