merge two uneven dataframes by ID and fill in missing values

Question

I'm new to r. This is my first forum question... I'm trying to merge two datasets like these:

df1 <- data.frame(ID = letters[1:5],
                  x = 5:9,
                  y = c(NA,6,5,NA,NA))

> df1
  ID x  y
1  a 5 NA
2  b 6  6
3  c 7  5
4  d 8 NA
5  e 9 NA


df2 <- data.frame(ID = letters[4:8],
                  y = 7:11,
                  z = c(4,3,NA,2,1))

> df2
  ID  y  z
1  d  7  4
2  e  8  3
3  f  9 NA
4  g 10  2
5  h 11  1

outcome should look like this:

> df3
  ID  x  y  z
1  a  5 NA NA
2  b  6  6 NA
3  c  7  5 NA
4  d  8  7  4
5  e  9  8  3
6  f NA  9 NA
7  g NA 10  2
8  h NA 11  1

I looked around in various forums but couldn't find the solution to this specific problem :/

Any suggestions are much appreciated!

Answer 1

We can use {powerjoin} :

library(powerjoin)

power_full_join(df1, df2, by = "ID", conflict = coalesce_xy)
#>   ID  x  z  y
#> 1  a  5 NA NA
#> 2  b  6 NA  6
#> 3  c  7 NA  5
#> 4  d  8  4  7
#> 5  e  9  3  8
#> 6  f NA NA  9
#> 7  g NA  2 10
#> 8  h NA  1 11

^{Created on 2022-04-14 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}