How do I merge these 2 tables/dataframes if the columns aren't sorted the same way numerically?

Question

I'm trying to combine these 2 tables into 1 dataframe but the issue is that the Patient Numbers don't match up.

This is roughly the first table (there's many more patients but this is the overall format)

This is the second table, which has the RNA-Seq Genes (there's many more genes, but general format)

My question is How do I merge these 2 into 1 table or dataframe, so that the patients will align and their corresponding values?

What do you mean by the patientIDs not lining up? Can you post a reproducible example? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example — Bill O'Brien, Jul 20 '21 at 19:28
Does your second data.frame use row names or did you omit the patients column names? Nevertheless: you need `merge`. — Martin Gal, Jul 20 '21 at 19:31
Please follow @BillO'Brien's advice in producing example data when you ask questions in the future. Are the patients ID unique in the two tables? If there are duplicate entries how do you want to resolve that when merging? — Yuan Yin, Jul 20 '21 at 19:34
Thanks, will do reproducible in the future - They're the same Patient IDs, just sorted in a different order as the table shows. @Martin Gal the data table doesn't have the Patient header for the column, is it necessary to add that to merge? — ww22an, Jul 20 '21 at 19:45
You need to identify the column (see @RoryS answer) to do the merge. — Martin Gal, Jul 20 '21 at 19:47

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 20 '21 at 19:32

2

Assuming your tables are called table1 and table2 respectively and share the common column Patient, use left_join from tidyverse, e.g.:

library(tidyverse)
left_join(table1, table2, by = "Patient")

answered Jul 20 '21 at 19:32

Rory S

1 Answers1