Substring replacement in data frame, based on a look-up table

Question

As input, I've got a large data frame in R with lists of strings of different lengths, referring to certain codes - like this:

  glt.code glt.phylogeny                   
1 adha1238 adha1238                    
2 adiv1239 adiv1239                    
3 adiw1235 adiw1235                    
4 aerr1238 jikr1238;jikr1238;aerr1238

I would like to replace the codes in the column glt.phylogeny based on their name in this look-up table:

  code     name                       level     
1 adha1238 Adhari                     language
2 adiv1239 Kotia-Adivasi Oriya-Desiya language
3 adiw1235 Adiwasi Garasia            language
4 aerr1238 Aer                        language
5 jikr1238 Jikrio Aer                 dialect 

My desired output looks like this:

  glt.code glt.phylogeny.names                   
1 adha1238 Adhari                    
2 adiv1239 Kotia-Adivasi Oriya-Desiya                    
3 adiw1235 Adiwasi Garasia                    
4 aerr1238 Jikrio Aer;Jikrio Aer;Aer 

I'd like to find a pipelined (dplyr) solution replacing all substrings in a column of a data frame based on a look-up table. I've experimented using str_replace_all and stri_replace_all_fixed, based on other questions on Stack Overflow but without a working result.

The actual data frame and look-up table is much larger than that so a scalable solution would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I think this will get you what you want using str_replace_all by extracting a named vector from your lookup table:

library(tidyverse)
# data
df <- tibble(
  glt.code = c("adha1238", "adiv1239", "adiw1235", "aerr1238"),
  glt.phylogeny = c("adha1238", "adiv1239", "adiw1235", "jikr1238;jikr1238;aerr1238")
)
df_look_up <- tibble(
  code = c("adha1238", "adiv1239", "adiw1235", "aerr1238", "jikr1238"),
  name = c("Adhari", "Kotia-Adivasi Oriya-Desiya", "Adivasi Garasia", "Aer", "Jikrio Aer"),
  level = c("language", 
            "language", "language", "language", "dialect")
)

# create named vector
named_look_up_vector <- df_look_up %>% 
  pull(name, code)

# use str_replace_all
df %>% 
  mutate(glt.phylogeny = str_replace_all(glt.phylogeny, named_look_up_vector))
# # A tibble: 4 × 2
#   glt.code glt.phylogeny             
#   <chr>    <chr>                     
# 1 adha1238 Adhari                    
# 2 adiv1239 Kotia-Adivasi Oriya-Desiya
# 3 adiw1235 Adivasi Garasia           
# 4 aerr1238 Jikrio Aer;Jikrio Aer;Aer