How to remove duplicate columns after dplyr join?

Question

Consider two dataframes, df1 and df2.

df1 has columns id, a, b.

df2 has columns id, a, c.

I want to perform a left join such that the combined dataframe has columns id, a, b, c.

combined <- df1 %>% left_join(df2, by="id")

But in the combined dataframe, the columns are id, a.x, b, a.y, c.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

First of all, you have to perform the join by id:

combined <- df1 %>% left_join(df2, by="id")

Then you can rename those with .x and drop those with .y

combined <- combined %>% 

  rename_at(

    vars(ends_with(".x")),

    ~str_replace(., "\\..$","")

  ) %>% 

  select_at(

    vars(-ends_with(".y"))

  )

If you are a beginner and want to know more about R then do check out the R programming tutorial.