Can dplyr package be used for conditional mutating?

Can the mutate be used when the mutation is conditional (depending on the values of certain column values)?

This example helps showing what I mean.

structure(list(a = c(1, 3, 4, 6, 3, 2, 5, 1), b = c(1, 3, 4, 
2, 6, 7, 2, 6), c = c(6, 3, 6, 5, 3, 6, 5, 3), d = c(6, 2, 4, 
5, 3, 7, 2, 6), e = c(1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 6, 3), f = c(2, 3, 4, 
2, 2, 7, 5, 2)), .Names = c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f"), row.names = c(NA, 
8L), class = "data.frame")

  a b c d e f
1 1 1 6 6 1 2
2 3 3 3 2 2 3
3 4 4 6 4 4 4
4 6 2 5 5 5 2
5 3 6 3 3 6 2
6 2 7 6 7 7 7
7 5 2 5 2 6 5
8 1 6 3 6 3 2

I was hoping to find a solution to my problem using the dplyr package (and yes I know this not code that should work, but I guess it makes the purpose clear) for creating a new column g:

 library(dplyr)
 df <- mutate(df,
         if (a == 2 | a == 5 | a == 7 | (a == 1 & b == 4)){g = 2},
         if (a == 0 | a == 1 | a == 4 | a == 3 |  c == 4) {g = 3})

The result of the code I am looking for should have this result in this particular example:

  a b c d e f  g
1 1 1 6 6 1 2  3
2 3 3 3 2 2 3  3
3 4 4 6 4 4 4  3
4 6 2 5 5 5 2 NA
5 3 6 3 3 6 2 NA
6 2 7 6 7 7 7  2
7 5 2 5 2 6 5  2
8 1 6 3 6 3 2  3

Does anyone have an idea about how to do this in dplyr? This data frame is just an example, the data frames I am dealing with are much larger. Because of its speed I tried to use dplyr, but perhaps there are other, better ways to handle this problem?

5 Answers
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