How to merge data in R using R merge, dplyr, or data.table

R has a number of quick, elegant ways to join data frames by a common column. I’d like to show you three of them:

• base R’s merge() function,


• dplyr’s join family of functions, and


• data.table’s bracket syntax.

Get and import the data

For this example I’ll use one of my favorite demo data sets — flight delay times from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. If you want to follow along, head to http://bit.ly/USFlightDelays and download data for the time …

analytics data dplyr merge r language