CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdataframe
RandomThinker
RandomThinker

Reputation: 391

Cleaning duplicates across columns in R dataframe

I have a dataframe that includes duplicates across three columns:

Name      Year     Job1      Job2       Job3
Bob       2011     director  director   chair
Bob       2012     director  chair
Wendy     2011     advisor   chair      advisor
Henry     2010     CEO       president  president

I want to remove the duplicates among the columns "job1", "job2" and "job3" in each row:

Name      Year     Job1      Job2       Job3
Bob       2011     director  NA         chair
Bob       2012     director  chair
Wendy     2011     advisor   chair      NA
Henry     2010     CEO       president  NA

Basically, if duplicates exist,the value in the former column stays and the value in the later column is removed (for example, if duplicates exist between "job1" and "job2", the value in "job1" remains).

Upvotes: 2

Views: 28

Answers (1)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 886938

We can loop over the 'Job' columns rowwise and replace the duplicates with NA

nm1 <- grep('^Job\\d+$', names(df1))
df1[nm1] <- t(apply(df1[nm1], 1, function(x) replace(x, duplicated(x), NA)))

-output

df1
#   Name Year     Job1      Job2  Job3
#1   Bob 2011 director      <NA> chair
#2   Bob 2012 director     chair      
#3 Wendy 2011  advisor     chair  <NA>
#4 Henry 2010      CEO president  <NA>

data

df1 <- structure(list(Name = c("Bob", "Bob", "Wendy", "Henry"), Year = c(2011L, 
2012L, 2011L, 2010L), Job1 = c("director", "director", "advisor", 
"CEO"), Job2 = c("director", "chair", "chair", "president"), 
    Job3 = c("chair", "", "advisor", "president")), 
    class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-4L))

Upvotes: 2

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