dplyr left join without middle names in r

To conduct a left join in dplyr without middle names, we can use the str_remove() function from the stringr package to remove the middle names in the join variables. Here is an example code:

main.r
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

# create example data frames
df1 <- data.frame(id = c(1, 2, 3),
                  name = c("John Smith", "Jane Doe", "Bob Johnson"))
df2 <- data.frame(id = c(1, 2, 4),
                  name = c("John A. Smith", "Jane M. Doe", "Sarah Johnson"))

# remove middle names from both data frames
df1_clean <- df1 %>% mutate(name = str_remove(name, " [A-Z]\\.? "))
df2_clean <- df2 %>% mutate(name = str_remove(name, " [A-Z]\\.? "))

# conduct left join without middle names
df_join <- df1_clean %>% left_join(df2_clean, by = "id")

# view result
df_join
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In this code, we first load the dplyr and stringr packages. We then create two example data frames, df1 and df2, which have an id column and a name column with middle names.

Next, we use mutate() and str_remove() to create new data frames, df1_clean and df2_clean, that remove the middle names from the name column using the regular expression " [A-Z]\.? ".

Finally, we conduct a left join between df1_clean and df2_clean using left_join() and the id column as the join variable. This produces the df_join data frame, which contains the id column and the name column from both data frames, without middle names.

We can view the result by calling df_join in the console.