I'm trying to use R to merge data from different datasets using:
merge(x,y, all=T, by="ID")
After the merge occurs I obviously have the complete ID column, and the other columns full of NAs.
This is fine in general but this time I need to generate another column that retains every value of my analysis from the 3 previous columns.
Findings.x Findings.y
1 <NA> Decreases
2 Increases <NA>
3 <NA> Decreases
4 Increases <NA>
5 <NA> Increases
6 Increases <NA>
7 <NA> Decreases
The output I'm searching for is:
Findings.summary
1 Decreases
2 Increases
3 Decreases
4 Increases
5 Increases
6 Increases
7 Decreases
What is a good strategy to do this? Shall I merge them in a different way?
I'd like to keep it simply and stay into R-base if the solution is simple enough.
Edit:
This post has a similar problem, I tried to apply this solution:
data.frame(a=data$a, mycol=apply(data[,-1],1,sum,na.rm=TRUE))
But my rows are not numeric, so it doesn't work.
Edit 2
This solution of the same post solved the problem:
data$m = data$x # your new merged column start with x
data$m[!is.na(data$y)] = data$y[!is.na(data$y)] # merge with y
data$m[!is.na(data$z)] = data$z[!is.na(data$z)] # merge with z
> data
a x y z m
1 A 1 NA NA 1
2 B 2 NA NA 2
3 C NA 3 NA 3
4 D NA NA 4 4
5 E NA NA 5 5
It also works on character strings, if you have a better solution let me know.
