How to reorder columns based on a column's values from another data frame?

Question

I have a data frame df, it looks something like this:

alpha	romeo	beta	carlos	bumblebee
alpha value 1	romeo value 1	beta value 1	carlos value 1	bumblebee value 1
alpha value 2	romeo value 2	beta value 2	carlos value 2	bumblebee value 2

I also have a data dictionary data_dict:

VariableName	column2	column3
alpha	some value	some value
carlos	some value	some value
romeo	some value	some value
beta	some value	some value
bumblebee	some value	some value

How do I order the column of df to have the same order as the entires in VariableName from data_dict?

-output:

alpha	carlos	romeo	beta	bumblebee
alpha value 1	carlos value 1	romeo value 1	beta value 1	bumblebee value 1
alpha value 2	carlos value 2	romeo value 2	beta value 2	bumblebee value 2

`df[, data_dict$VariableName]` – zephryl Jan 31 '23 at 22:58 — zephryl, Jan 31 '23 at 22:58

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 31 '23 at 23:02

I'd use dplyr::select

library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
variablenames <- c("alpha", "carlos", "romeo", "beta", "bumblebee")
data_dict <- data.frame(VariableName = variablenames,
                        column2 = "some value",
                        column3 = "some value")

df <- data.frame(alpha = 1:3,
                 romeo = 1:3,
                 beta = 1:3,
                 carlos = 1:3,
                 bumblebee = 1:3)
select(df, data_dict$VariableName)
#>   alpha carlos romeo beta bumblebee
#> 1     1      1     1    1         1
#> 2     2      2     2    2         2
#> 3     3      3     3    3         3

^{Created on 2023-01-31 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

How to reorder columns based on a column's values from another data frame?

1 Answers1