Dictionary style replace multiple items

Question

I have a large data.frame of character data that I want to convert based on what is commonly called a dictionary in other languages.

Currently I am going about it li

Answer 1

If you're open to using packages, plyr is a very popular one and has this handy mapvalues() function that will do just what you're looking for:

foo <- mapvalues(foo, from=c("AA", "AC", "AG"), to=c("0101", "0102", "0103"))

Note that it works for data types of all kinds, not just strings.