R column mapping - r

Question

How to map column of one CSV file to column of another CSV file in R. If both are in same data type.
For example first column of data frame A consist some text with country name in it. While column of second data frame B contains a standard list of all country .Now I have to map all rows of first data frame with standard country column.
For example column (location) of data frame A consist 10000 rows of data like this
Sydney, Australia
Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark
Auckland, New Zealand
Mumbai Area, India
Singapore
df1 <- data.frame(col1 = 1:5, col2=c("Sydney, Australia", "Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark", "Auckland, New Zealand", "Mumbai Area, India", "Singapore"))
Now I have another column (country) of data frame B as
India
USA
New Zealand
UK
Singapore
Denmark
China
df2 <- data.frame(col1=1:7, col2=c("India", "USA", "New Zealand", "UK", "Singapore", "Denmark", "China"))
If location column matches with Country column then, I want to replace that location with country name otherwise it will remain as it is. Sample output is as
Sydney, Australia
Denmark
New Zealand
India
Singapore

Answer 1

Initially, it looked like a trivial question but it's not. This approach works like this:
1. We convert the location string into vector using unlist, strsplit.
2. Then we check if any string in the vector is available in country column. If it is available, we store the country name in res and if not we store notfound.
2. Finally, we check if res contains a country name or not.
df1 <- data.frame(location = c('Sydney, Australia',
'Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark',
'Auckland, New Zealand',
'Mumbai Area, India',
'Singapore'),stringsAsFactors = F)
df2 <- data.frame(country = c('India',
'USA',
'New Zealand',
'UK',
'Singapore',
'Denmark',
'China'),stringsAsFactors = F)
get_values <- function(i)
{
val <- unlist(strsplit(i, split = ','))
val <- sapply(val, str_trim)
res <- c()
for(j in val)
{
if(j %in% df2$country) res <- append(res, j)
else res <- append(res, 'notfound')
}
if(all(res == 'notfound')) return (i)
else return (res[res!='notfound'])
}
df1$location2 <- sapply(df1$location, get_values)
location location2
1 Sydney, Australia Sydney, Australia
2 Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark Denmark
3 Auckland, New Zealand New Zealand
4 Mumbai Area, India India
5 Singapore Singapore

Answer 2

A solution using tidyverse. First, please convert your col2 to character by setting stringsAsFactors = FALSE because that is easier to work with.
We can use str_extract to extract the matched country name, and then create a new col2 with mutate and ifelse.
df3 <- df1 %>%
mutate(Country = str_extract(col2, paste0(df2$col2, collapse = "|")),
col2 = ifelse(is.na(Country), col2, Country)) %>%
select(-Country)
df3
# col1 col2
# 1 1 Sydney, Australia
# 2 2 Denmark
# 3 3 New Zealand
# 4 4 India
# 5 5 Singapore
We can also start with df1, use separate_rows to separate the country name. After that, use semi_join to check if the country names are in df2. Finally, we can combine the data frame with the original df1 by rows, and then filter the first one for each id in col1. df3 is the final output.
library(tidyverse)
df3 <- df1 %>%
separate_rows(col2, sep = ", ") %>%
semi_join(df2, by = "col2") %>%
bind_rows(df1) %>%
group_by(col1) %>%
slice(1) %>%
ungroup() %>%
arrange(col1)
df3
# # A tibble: 5 x 2
# col1 col2
# <int> <chr>
# 1 1 Sydney, Australia
# 2 2 Denmark
# 3 3 New Zealand
# 4 4 India
# 5 5 Singapore
DATA
df1 <- data.frame(col1 = 1:5,
col2=c("Sydney, Australia", "Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark", "Auckland, New Zealand", "Mumbai Area, India", "Singapore"),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
df2 <- data.frame(col1=1:7,
col2=c("India", "USA", "New Zealand", "UK", "Singapore", "Denmark", "China"),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

Answer 3

If you are looking for the countries, and they come after the cities then you can do something like this.
transform(df1,col3= sub(paste0(".*,\\s*(",paste0(df2$col2,collapse="|"),")"),"\\1",col2))
col1 col2 col3
1 1 Sydney, Australia Sydney, Australia
2 2 Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark Denmark
3 3 Auckland, New Zealand New Zealand
4 4 Mumbai Area, India India
5 5 Singapore Singapore
Breakdown:
> A=sub(".*,\\s(.*)","\\1",df1$col2)
> B=sapply(A,grep,df2$col2,value=T)
> transform(df1,col3=replace(A,!lengths(B),col2[!lengths(B)]))
col1 col2 col3
1 1 Sydney, Australia Sydney, Australia
2 2 Aarhus C, Central Region, Denmark Denmark
3 3 Auckland, New Zealand New Zealand
4 4 Mumbai Area, India India
5 5 Singapore Singapore