mergetest.R

authors <- data.frame(
  surname = I(c("Tukey", "Venables", "Tierney", "Ripley", "McNeil")),
  nationality = c("US", "Australia", "US", "UK", "Australia"),
  deceased = c("yes", rep("no", 4)))
books <- data.frame(
  name = I(c("Venables", "Tierney", "Tukey", 
             "Ripley", "Ripley", "McNeil", "R Core")),
  title = c("Exploratory Data Analysis",
            "Modern Applied Statistics ...",
            "LISP-STAT",
            "Spatial Statistics", "Stochastic Simulation",
            "Interactive Data Analysis",
            "An Introduction to R"),
  other.author = c(NA, "Ripley", NA, NA, NA, NA,
                   "Venables & Smith"))


(m1 <- merge(authors, books, by.x = "surname", by.y = "name"))
(m2 <- merge(books, authors, by.x = "name", by.y = "surname"))
stopifnot(as.character(m1[, 1]) == as.character(m2[, 1]),
          all.equal(m1[, -1], m2[, -1][ names(m1)[-1] ]),
          dim(merge(m1, m2, by = integer(0))) == c(36, 10))