The “merge” Function in R

• Package: Base R (no specific package required)

• Purpose: Merges two data frames based on common columns or row names.

• General Class: Data Manipulation

• Required Argument(s):

• x, y: Data frames or objects that can be coerced to data frames.

• ...: Additional arguments specifying the columns or row names on which to merge.

• Notable Optional Arguments:

• by: A character vector specifying the common columns or row names by which to merge.

• by.x, by.y: Character vectors specifying the columns or row names in x and y by which to merge.

• all.x, all.y: Logical indicating whether to include all observations from x or y (or both) in the result.

• suffixes: A character vector specifying the suffixes to be appended to the names of overlapping variables.

• sort: Logical indicating whether to sort the result by the merged columns.

• Example:

• # Example data for merging data frames
  df1 <- data.frame(ID = c(1, 2, 3), Name = c("Alice", "Bob", "Charlie"))
  df2 <- data.frame(ID = c(2, 3, 4), Age = c(25, 30, 22))
  
  # Merge data frames by the 'ID' column
  merged_df <- merge(df1, df2, by = "ID")
  
  # Display the merged data frame
  print(merged_df)

• In this example, the merge function is used to merge two data frames (df1 and df2) based on the common column “ID.” The result is a merged data frame (merged_df) containing columns from both input data frames matched on the specified column.