Hi,
First, a reminder to use a full reprex whenever possible. See the FAQ: What's a reproducible example (`reprex`) and how do I do one?.
Second, there are natural language processing tools to handle this job. One of the best places to start is the tidytext package and its free online book, which includes tools for just this kind of task.
Third, your data frame doesn't actually contain what you want. It's a subtle difference.
existing <- "c(\"how\", \"did\", \"everyone\", \"feel\", \"about\", \"the\", \"climate\", \"change\", \"question\", \"last\", \"night\")"
print(existing)
#> [1] "c(\"how\", \"did\", \"everyone\", \"feel\", \"about\", \"the\", \"climate\", \"change\", \"question\", \"last\", \"night\")"
needed <- c("how", "did", "everyone", "feel", "about", "the", "climate", "change", "question", "last", "night")
existing == needed
#> [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
print(needed)
#> [1] "how" "did" "everyone" "feel" "about" "the"
#> [7] "climate" "change" "question" "last" "night"
Created on 2020-02-23 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)
caused by making the c() function a part of the string, by enclosing everything in the outer pair of ".
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))
existing <- "c(\"how\", \"did\", \"everyone\", \"feel\", \"about\", \"the\", \"climate\", \"change\", \"question\", \"last\", \"night\")"
needed <- c("how", "did", "everyone", "feel", "about", "the", "climate", "change", "question", "last", "night")
stops <- c("the")
needed <- as.data.frame(needed)
stops <- as.data.frame(stops)
colnames(needed) <- "word"
colnames(stops) <- "word"
anti_join(needed,stops)
#> Joining, by = "word"
#> Warning: Column `word` joining factors with different levels, coercing to
#> character vector
#> word
#> 1 how
#> 2 did
#> 3 everyone
#> 4 feel
#> 5 about
#> 6 climate
#> 7 change
#> 8 question
#> 9 last
#> 10 night
Created on 2020-02-23 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)