Hi,

I have a large dataframe that contains species names.  I have a second dataframe that contains species names and some additional info, called 'Class', about each species.  I would like match the species name is the first data frame with the 'Class' information contained in the second.  Since the species names are often formatted differently between the data sets, merge doesn't work well.  grep does the trick, but the function needs to be called separately for each observation in the first data frame.  I put grep into a loop, but this is too slow.  Is there a way to run grep repeatedly without resorting to a loop?  Possibly something in the apply family?

  df1 <- data.frame(Taxa = c('blue', 'red', NA))
  df2 <- data.frame(Taxa = c( 'blue', 'red', NA), Class = c('Z', 'HI', 'A'))

  index <- NULL
  for (i in 1:length(df1$Taxa)) {
    index[i] <- grep(df1$Taxa[1], df2$Taxa)
    }
  index

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

==================================
Jake J. Beaulieu, PhD
US Environmental Protection Agency
National Risk Management Research Lab
26 W. Martin Luther King Drive
Cincinnati, OH 45268
USA
513-569-7842  (desk)
513-487-2511 (fax)
beaulieu.jake@epa.gov


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