double match a data.frame

I'd like to do a double match on a data.frame to extract row indices. For example, in the following data.frame, I want to match first on match1, and within each element of match1, I want to match by开发者_运维知识库 match2. Think of this as a double-sort (first by name, then by date) except that I'm not sorting, I'm matching

test = data.frame( name = c( "bob" , "jane","adam","jane" ,"bob" , "adam" ) , date = as.Date(c(1,2,2,1,2,1)))
match1 = c( "jane" , "adam", "bob")
match2 = c( as.Date(c(2,1)))
result = c( 2,4,3,6,5,1 )

Note that for your code to work as written, you need the zoo library loaded (it masks as.Date)

library("zoo")

It seem what you want it the indicies of the data.frame that correspond to the data.frame sorted by name according to match1 and then by date according to match2. You can use factors to create this ordering, and then order to get the indicies.

order(factor(test$name, match1), factor(as.character(test$date), as.character(match2)))

The as.character is needed to coerce the dates to characters so that they can be turned into factors with the right ordering.

One way to check for a double-match is to do a double-sort on "test" (call this test2) and test for the equality of "test" and "test2"