Inequality constraints in dplyr join

[mfherman]

One option is the fuzzyjoin package. See this thread for a couple examples:

Tidy way to range join tables, on an interval of dates

You can do it with the fuzzyjoin package, which implements various not quite exact matching joins in dplyr syntax. library(tidyverse) library(fuzzyjoin) df1 <- tibble::tribble( ~id, ~category, ~date, 1L, "a", "7/1/2000", 2L, "b", "11/1/2000", 3L, "c", "7/1/2002" ) %>% mutate(date = as.Date(date, format = "%m/%d/%Y")) df2 <- tibble::tribble( ~category, ~other_info, ~start, ~end, "a", "x", "1/1/2000", "12/31/2000", "b", "y", "1/1/2001", "12/31/2001", "c", "z", "1/1/2002", "12/31/2002" ) %>% mutate_at(vars(start, end), as.Date, format = "%m/%d/%Y") fuzzy_left_join( df1, df2, by = c( "category" = "c…

If you’re working with large datasets, you’re probably better off with foverlaps() from data.table.