It started out as a joke, but Jenny Bryan recently posted a vlookup implementation in R. Here is the original post as seen on twitter:
Sometimes you just need to party like it’s VLOOKUP time 😁🖇 … seriously, sometimes a join doesn’t fit the bill pic.twitter.com/jz8StfQdNg
— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) April 3, 2018
The argument for the creation of this kind of lookup implementation in R, was to help facilitate a join that wasn’t covered by the standard joins.