Based on the data and code below how can I replace duplicates by adding a, b, c and so on for each duplicate value except the first one?
Please note that in the actual data provided to me, there are thousands of entries, so there could be any number of duplicates thus, it would be hard for me to manually find each and every duplicate value in the data. So, I don’t know if it might be a problem in not identifying the duplicates first before replacing them. Maybe there is a way to identify them first, which as of now I don’t know.
Code:
# Sample data
df = structure(list(id = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 35555, 35555, 35555
), year = c(2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022,
2022, 2022)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -11L))
# Desired output
df = structure(list(id = c(1, "1a", "1b", "1c", 2, "2a", "2b", "2c", 35555, "35555a", "35555b"
), year = c(2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022,
2022, 2022)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -11L))
# Replace/modify duplicates
>Solution :
If the suffix doesn’t matter, make.unique does this automatically
library(dplyr)
df %>%
mutate(id = make.unique(as.character(id)))