Hi,
I am still new to R and have, in spite of searching all over, found no 
"understandable" documentation for how to join two (or more) frequency 
tables.
Why would I want to do that and what do I mean by "joining" ? Let me try 
to explain:

I have a diagnosis form that allows registration of up to three diagnosis 
codes on animals with birth defects, like this:

father.id diagnosis diagnosis2 diagnosis3
a             100         200            300
b              200        100            340
....

and so on.

As you can see the same diagnosis can show up in either field (1, 2 or 3). 

I am interested in how many times each diagnosis shows up for offspring 
from the same father (looking at inheritance)

The best I have come up with so far is

table(father.id, diagnosis)
table(father.id, diagnosis2)
table(father.id, diagnosis3)

which gives me the frequency counts for each combination of father.id and 
diagnosis code

and then I manually join these tables together by cutting and pasting (in 
Excel!!). Oh the horror!

The resulting table looks like this though and gives me what I want:

father.id      100      200      300   340  
a                   1         1         1     0
b                   1          1         0    1
.....

This is incredibly cumbersome and therefore I want to find a way of doing 
this completely in R script so that I have the code ready when I need it 
again.
So far I have tried with several varieties of merge() and xtabs() but have 
given up. I can not afford to spend more time on this and as a last resort 
I'm hoping anyone here could pass me a tip.
I use R for modelling but I am so far finding it hard to wrap my head 
around it when it comes to the pre-analysis data manipulation like this as 
I am not proficient enough (i.e. do not quite understand) in the language 
and data structure intricacies.

Regards, 
Jan 
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