How to join two tables tibbles by list columns in R

Question

If the list of both key variables is identical, I want the row to be included in the final table, and if not then it should not be included. In the below example there are two key variables x and y. So the result should be only the first row since it's the only identical one in both key variables.

Refer to the code below:

tib1 <- tibble(x = list(1, 2, 3), y = list(4, 5, 6))
tib1
# A tibble: 3 × 2
      x         y
 <list>    <list>
1 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>
2 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>
3 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>

tib2 <- tibble(x = list(1, 2, 4, 5), y = list(4, c(5, 10), 6, 7))
tib2
# A tibble: 4 × 2
      x         y
 <list>    <list>
1 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>
2 <dbl [1]> <dbl [2]>
3 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>
4 <dbl [1]> <dbl [1]>

dplyr::inner_join(tib1, tib2)

Answer 1

You can use the hash from digest as follows:

tib1 <- tibble(x = list(1, 2, 3), y = list(4, 5, 6))
tib2 <- tibble(x = list(1, 2, 4, 5), y = list(4, c(5, 10), 6, 7))

tib1 <- mutate_all(tib1, funs(hash = map_chr(., digest::digest)))
tib2 <- mutate_all(tib2, funs(hash = map_chr(., digest::digest)))

dplyr::inner_join(tib1, tib2, c('x_hash', 'y_hash')) %>%
  select(x.x, x.y)