How to do vlookup and fill down (like in Excel) in R?

Question

I have a dataset about 105000 rows and 30 columns. I have a categorical variable that I would like to assign it to a number. In Excel, I would probably do something with

Answer 1

I think you can also use match():

largetable$HouseTypeNo <- with(lookup,
                     HouseTypeNo[match(largetable$HouseType,
                                       HouseType)])

This still works if I scramble the order of lookup.