How to prevent merge from reordering columns

Question

In the following example

x <- data.frame(code = 7:9, food = c(\'banana\', \'apple\', \'popcorn\'))
y <- data.frame(food = c(\'banana\', \'apple\', \'po         


        

Answer 1

Here's a generic version of your base workaround:

merge(x, y)[, union(names(x), names(y))]