I am currently looking for a way to simplify searching through a column within a dataframe for a vector of values and replacing each of of those values with another value (also contained within a separate vector). I can run a for loop for this, but it must be possible within the apply family, I'm just not seeing it yet. Very new to using the apply family and could use help.

So far, I've been able to have it replace all instances of the first value in my vector with the new first value in the new vector, it just isn't iterating past the first level. I hope this makes sense. Here is the code I have:

#standardize tank location
old_tank_list <-  c("7.C.4","7.C.5","7.C.6","7.C.7","7.C.8","7.C.9","7.C.10","7.C.11")
new_tank_list <- c("7.B.3-4","7.C.3-4","7.C.1-2","7.C.5-6","7.C.7-8","7.C.9-10","7.E.9-10","7.C.11-12")


sapply(df_growth$Tank,function(y) gsub(old_tank_list,std_tank_list,y))

Tank is the name of the column I am trying to replace all of these values within. I haven't assigned it back yet, because I want to test the functionality first. Thanks for any help you can offer.

Hopefully, this image will help. The photo on the left is the column before my function is applied. The coloumn on the right is after. Basically, I just want to batch change text values.Before and After

CodePudding user response：

library(dplyr)
df %>%
  mutate(Tank = recode(Tank, !!!setNames(new_tank_list, old_tank_list)))