Combine two columns in one in R without duplication

Question

I have a data frame with two columns below:

HomeTeam     AwayTeam
Zimbabwe     Kenya
Netherlands  Zimbabwe
Kenya        Amsterdam

I want to create a column Team from both these column but it shouldn't repeat the name of the team. How do I go about it?

Are you looking for `paste(HomeTeam, AwayTeam)`? – Allan Cameron Oct 22 '22 at 18:06 — Allan Cameron, Oct 22 '22 at 18:06

Ben Bolker · Accepted Answer · 2022-10-22T18:33:45.600

1

This is a little bit of a guess since your question is not perfectly clear, but I think union() is what you're looking for ...

Make up an example:

dd <- read.table(header = TRUE, text = "
HomeTeam     AwayTeam
Zimbabwe     Kenya
Netherlands  Zimbabwe
Kenya        Amsterdam
")

Construct a data frame that contains a single column with the (non-repeated) team names from both columns:

result <- data.frame(Team = with(dd, union(HomeTeam, AwayTeam)))

edited Oct 22 '22 at 18:33

answered Oct 22 '22 at 18:09

Ben Bolker

Hi. Thanks for your reply. This was just an example of what the data looked like.I have a data base called EPL so do I mention "EPL" in 'text ='? – IAwa Oct 22 '22 at 18:32
My data frame is called `dd`; if yours is called `EPL` then substitute that for `dd` in the last line of code shown (the rest is just there to set up an example). – Ben Bolker Oct 22 '22 at 18:34
2

If this solves your problem you are encouraged to click the check-mark to accept it (and upvote, if you want) – Ben Bolker Oct 22 '22 at 19:15

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 22 '22 at 19:31

1

Here is a tidyverse option:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

df %>%
  pivot_longer(everything(), 
               values_to = "Team") %>% 
  distinct(Team)

  Team       
  <chr>      
1 Zimbabwe   
2 Kenya      
3 Netherlands
4 Amsterdam

answered Oct 22 '22 at 19:31

TarJae

2 Answers2