Compare each row in two dataframes in R - r

Question

I have 2 data frames with account numbers and amounts plus some other irrelevant columns. I would like to compare the output with a Y or N if they match or not.
I need to compare the account number in row 1 in dataframe A to the account number in row 1 in dataframe B and if they match put a Y in a column or an N if they don't. I've managed to get the code to check if there is a match in the entire dataframe but I need to check each row individually.
E.g.
df1
|account.num|x1|x2|x3|
|100|a|b|c|
|101|a|b|c|
|102|a|b|c|
|103|a|b|c|
df2
|account.num|x1|x2|x3|
|100|a|b|c|
|102|a|b|c|
|101|a|b|c|
|103|a|b|c|
output
|account.num|x1|x2|x3|match|
|100|a|b|c|Y|
|101|a|b|c|N|
|102|a|b|c|N|
|103|a|b|c|Y|
So, row 1 matches as they have the same account number, but row 2 doesn't because they are different. However, the other data in the dataframe doesn't matter just that column. Can I do this without merging the data frames? (I did have tables, but they won't work. I don't know why. So sorry if that's hard to follow).

Answer 1

You can use == to compare if account.num is equal, and use this boolean vector to subset c("N", "Y")
df1$match <- c("N", "Y")[1 + (df1[[1]] == df2[[1]])]
df1
# account.num x1 x2 x3 match
#1 100 a b c Y
#2 101 a b c N
#3 102 a b c N
#4 103 a b c Y
Data:
df1 <- data.frame(account.num=100:103, x1="a", x2="b", x3="c")
df2 <- data.frame(account.num=c(100,102,101,103), x1="a", x2="b", x3="c")

Answer 2

If you want a base R solution, here is a quick sketch. Assuming boath dataframes are of the same length (number of rows), it should work with your data.
# example dataframes
a <- data.frame(A=c(1,2,3), B=c("one","two","three"))
b <- data.frame(A=c(3,2,1), B=c("three","two","one"))
res <- c() #initialise empty result vector
for (rownum in c(1:nrow(a))) {
# iterate over all numbers of rows
res[rownum] <- all(a[rownum,]==b[rownum,])
}
res # result vector
# [1] FALSE TRUE FALSE
# you can put it in frame a like this. example colname is "equalB"
a$equalB <- res

Answer 3

If you want a tidyverse solution, you can use left_join.
The principle here would be to try to match the data from df2 to the data from df1. If it matches, it would add TRUE to a match column. Then, the code replace the NA values with FALSE.
I'm also adding code to create the data frames from the exemple.
library(tidyverse)
df1 <-
tribble(~account_num, ~x1, ~x2, ~x3,
100, "a", "b", "c",
101, "a", "b", "c",
102, "a", "b", "c",
103, "a", "b", "c") %>%
rowid_to_column() # because position in the df is an important information,
# I need to hardcode it in the df
df2 <-
tribble(~account_num, ~x1, ~x2, ~x3,
100, "a", "b", "c",
102, "a", "b", "c",
101, "a", "b", "c",
103, "a", "b", "c") %>%
rowid_to_column()
# take a
df1 %>%
# try to match df1 with version of df2 with a new column where `match` = TRUE
# according to `rowid`, `account_num`, `x1`, `x2`, and `x3`
left_join(df2 %>%
tibble::add_column(match = TRUE),
by = c("rowid", "account_num", "x1", "x2", "x3")
) %>%
# replace the NA in `match` with FALSE in the df
replace_na(list(match = FALSE))