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match and %in% are two very commonly-used function in R. So, what’s the difference of them?Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
First, how to use them — (copy from R manual)
matchreturns a vector of the positions of (first) matches of its first argument in its second.%in%is a more intuitive interface as a binary operator, which returns a logical vector indicating if there is a match or not for its left operand.
match(x, table, nomatch = NA_integer_, incomparables = NULL)x %in% table
Examples:
> a [1] 1 1 0 1 5 1 2 4 > b [1] 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 > match(a,b) [1] 10 10 NA 10 6 10 9 7 > a %in% b [1] TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
So, if two vectors are overlapped like
a —————
b —————————–
To get the overlapped part in order of a, use a[a %in% b], even though there are duplicates in the overlapped part. However, this does not work for match, since match() only returns the first match of a in b. For example,
> match(b,a) [1] NA NA NA NA NA 5 8 NA 7 1 > match(b,a, nomatch=0) [1] 0 0 0 0 0 5 8 0 7 1 > a[match(b,a, nomatch=0)] [1] 5 4 2 1
even using ‘nomatch=0’, the final command still returns 4 elements, not the overlapped ones.
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