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I am interested in joining person and household data using the SERIALNO variable from the 2019 5-year ACS for Texas. Here is my code for this action using RStudio Version 1.4.1106:

# Load Person and Household data for 2019 ACS

pums2019pop <- read.csv("C:\\psam_p48.csv")
pums2019hsg <- read.csv("C:\\psam_h48.csv")

# Join person and household data using SERIALNO
pums2019 <- inner_join(pums2017pop, pums2017hsg, by = c("SERIALNO"))

Once I have completed this action, I check the output for pums2019 and immediately notice that some variables such as PUMA, DIVISION, and ADJINC, have ".x" appended to the end of their names so that they now appear as: "PUMA.x", "DIVISION.x", and "ADJINC.x".

While I can work with the file without issue, I just have to spell out the variable name with the appended ".x", I am wondering if there is anyway to keep this from happening in the first place?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

GuedesBF
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Rafael Gonzalez
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  • This is happening because both your dataframes have similar column names, so R is doing that to be able to tell you which column comes from which dataframe. – Nareman Darwish Aug 03 '21 at 21:28
  • Thank you. So, is when merging, is there anyway to keep this from happening? Or would I need to, post merge, need to rename the variables back to their original names? – Rafael Gonzalez Aug 04 '21 at 18:12

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