The best way to attach labels to numeric variables

[mara]

@ktanizar

Factor works but the script gets really long and it takes a very long time to read the data in.

Using the forcats package you can get the unique factor levels for a set of observations by converting to factor after you've read in the data with as_factor().

Once you've read your data in, you can recode the factors with their labels, if you so choose (see thread below).

Quickly recoding large(ish) vectors in a tibble

I think you'll get a 2x speed up or so from using factors. At least in the case of using a recode, it should only have to change the 3 labels on the levels of the factors, rather than altering every element of the vector. suppressWarnings(library(tidyverse)) suppressWarnings(library(microbenchmark)) # object to decode and the key tbl <- tibble(CODE = sample(letters[1:3], 1e+06, replace = TRUE)) key <- tribble(~CODE, ~FRUIT, "a", "apple", "b", "banana", "c", "cherry" ) tbl_with_factor <- mutate(tbl, CODE = as.factor(CODE)) key_with_factor <- mutate(key, CODE = as.factor(CODE)) # Speed tests microbenchmark::microbenchmark( # Fastes…

Another option would be to use a "lookup table," which is nicely described in this thread (although, personally, I tend not to do that—I don't actually have a good reason, though):

Mutate and replace strings to new column

Glad you worked out a solution! Here are a few alternative ideas that might be a bit more streamlined. When recoding variables like this, I personally strongly favor maximizing readability and future maintainability — I don't want it to be a mystery to future-me (or anybody else) where and how the data coding decisions are made. Set up test data frame library(tidyverse) mrgb_trus <- data.frame( MRGB_gleason = c("3+4", "4", "3+4", "4+4", "3+3",NA, "3+4", "3+3", NA, "4+3", "3+3", "3+4", "3+4", NA, "3", "3+4", NA, NA, NA, NA, "4+3", "3+4", "3+3", "4+3", "4+4", "4+5", "3+3", "4+3", "4+3", NA, NA, "3+3", "4+4", "3+4", "4+5", "3+3", "5+4", NA, NA, "3+4", "4+3", NA, "3+3", "4+3",…