Question

Is there an easier way to ensure that a data frame’s rows are ordered according to a “target” vector as the one I implemented in the short example below?

df <- data.frame(name = letters[1:4], value = c(rep(TRUE, 2), rep(FALSE, 2)))

df
#   name value
# 1    a  TRUE
# 2    b  TRUE
# 3    c FALSE
# 4    d FALSE

target <- c("b", "c", "a", "d")

This somehow seems to be a bit too “complicated” to get the job done:

idx <- sapply(target, function(x) {
    which(df$name == x)
})
df <- df[idx,]
rownames(df) <- NULL

df 
#   name value
# 1    b  TRUE
# 2    c FALSE
# 3    a  TRUE
# 4    d FALSE

Answer 1

Try match:

df <- data.frame(name=letters[1:4], value=c(rep(TRUE, 2), rep(FALSE, 2)))
target <- c("b", "c", "a", "d")
df[match(target, df$name),]

  name value
2    b  TRUE
3    c FALSE
1    a  TRUE
4    d FALSE

It will work as long as your target contains exactly the same elements as df$name, and neither contain duplicate values.

From ?match:

match returns a vector of the positions of (first) matches of its first argument 
in its second.

Therefore match finds the row numbers that matches target‘s elements, and then we return df in that order.