I am attempting to write some R code that assesses whether or not two dataframes have any matches in their columns. If there are matches, one of the columns in the second dataframe should assign a "link" (via the links variable) to the first dataframe using the id column of the first dataframe.
In the event that there are multiple matches, I am trying to get the "link" variable to randomly select one of the matching id's.
Some reproducible code:
library(dplyr)
df1 = data.frame(ids = c(1:5),
var = c("a","a","c","b","b"))
df2 = data.frame(var = c('c','a','b','b','d'),
links = 0)
Ideally, I would like a resulting dataframe that looks like:
var links
1 c 3
2 a 1 or 2
3 b 4 or 5
4 b 4 or 5
5 d 0
where observations in the links column randomly select ids from df1 when df1$var matches df2$var. In the dataframe above, this is denoted by "or".
Note 1: The links column should be a numeric, I only made it character to allow to write the word "or".
Note 2: If there is not a match between df1$var and df2$var, the links column should remain a 0.
So far, I've gone this route, but I'm unsure about what to put after the ~
linked_df = df2 %>%
mutate(links=case_when(links==0 & var %in% df1$var ~
sample(c(df1$ids),n(),replace=T) # unsure about this line
TRUE ~ links)