CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdata-manipulation
Helix
Helix

Reputation: 103

How can I transform full state names to abbreviations?

I have a data frame A with a column called "states". The states are recorded by their full name, ex. "California". There are multiple rows for each state.

I have a data frame B, which has the number of gun deaths for each state. The states are recorded by abbreviations, ex. "CA"

What I would like is: I want each row in A to have the number of gun deaths for the corresponding state. I was planning to use dplyr::inner_join() for this.

But of course, the problem is that the state names are different in the different data frames.

What is the best way to make the names match?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4436

Answers (1)

IRTFM
IRTFM

Reputation: 263441

If you have two vectors of the same length and want to construct a translation table just add the input vector of state names as the names-attribute of the output vector of state abbreviationa, and then pass in the names as inputs to the "["-function:

 names(state.abb) <- state.name   
 # both are in-built values in the `state`-item of default `datasets` package
 ?state     # also See: ?Constants and ?data
 dfrm$abbrev <- state.abb[dfrm$states]

Upvotes: 5

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