Matching across datasets and columns - r

Question

I have a vector with words, e.g., like this:
w <- LETTERS[1:5]
and a dataframe with tokens of these words but also tokens of other words in different columns, e.g., like this:
set.seed(21)
df <- data.frame(
w1 = c(sample(LETTERS, 10)),
w2 = c(sample(LETTERS, 10)),
w3 = c(sample(LETTERS, 10)),
w4 = c(sample(LETTERS, 10))
)
df
w1 w2 w3 w4
1 U R A Y
2 G X P M
3 Q B S R
4 E O V T
5 V D G W
6 T A Q E
7 C K L U
8 D F O Z
9 R I M G
10 O T T I
# convert factor to character:
df[] <- lapply(df[], as.character)
I'd like to extract from dfall the tokens of those words that are contained in the vector w. I can do it like this but that doesn't look nice and is highly repetitive and error prone if the dataframe is larger:
extract <- c(df$w1[df$w1 %in% w],
df$w2[df$w2 %in% w],
df$w3[df$w3 %in% w],
df$w4[df$w4 %in% w])
I tried this, using paste0 to avoid addressing each column separately but that doesn't work:
extract <- df[paste0("w", 1:4)][df[paste0("w", 1:4)] %in% w]
extract
data frame with 0 columns and 10 rows
What's wrong with this code? Or which other code would work?

Answer 1

To answer your question, "What's wrong with this code?": The code df[paste0("w", 1:4)][df[paste0("w", 1:4)] %in% w] is the equivalent of df[df %in% w] because df[paste0("w", 1:4)], which you use twice, simply returns the entirety of df. That means df %in% w will return FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE because none of the variables in df are in w (w contains strings but not vectors of strings), and df[c(F, F, F, F)] returns an empty data frame.
If you're dealing with a single data type (strings), and the output can be a character vector, then use a matrix instead of a data frame, which is faster and is, in this case, a little easier to subset:
mat <- as.matrix(df)
mat[mat %in% w]
#[1] "B" "D" "E" "E" "A" "B" "E" "B"
This produces the same output as your attempt above with extract <- ….
If you want to keep some semblance of the original data frame structure then you can try the following, which outputs a list (necessary as the returned vectors for each variable might have different lengths):
lapply(df, function(x) x[x %in% w])
#### OUTPUT ####
$w1
[1] "B" "D" "E"
$w2
[1] "E" "A"
$w3
[1] "B"
$w4
[1] "E" "B"
Just call unlist or unclass on the returned list if you want a vector.