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

You could use mapvalues() from the plyr package.

Initial data:

dat <- data.frame(HouseType = c("Semi", "Single", "Row", "Single", "Apartment", "Apartment", "Row"))

> dat
  HouseType
1      Semi
2    Single
3       Row
4    Single
5 Apartment
6 Apartment
7       Row

Lookup / crosswalk table:

lookup <- data.frame(type_text = c("Semi", "Single", "Row", "Apartment"), type_num = c(1, 2, 3, 4))
> lookup
  type_text type_num
1      Semi        1
2    Single        2
3       Row        3
4 Apartment        4

Create the new variable:

dat$house_type_num <- plyr::mapvalues(dat$HouseType, from = lookup$type_text, to = lookup$type_num)

Or for simple replacements you can skip creating a long lookup table and do this directly in one step:

dat$house_type_num <- plyr::mapvalues(dat$HouseType,
                                      from = c("Semi", "Single", "Row", "Apartment"),
                                      to = c(1, 2, 3, 4))

Result:

> dat
  HouseType house_type_num
1      Semi              1
2    Single              2
3       Row              3
4    Single              2
5 Apartment              4
6 Apartment              4
7       Row              3