vlookup in R

Sachin J <sachinj.2006 at yahoo.com> wrote in
news:897147.50760.qm at web37606.mail.mud.yahoo.com:

Is there are function similar to excel vlookup in R. Please let me
know. 

Caveat: definition of VLOOKUP done from memory and by checking OO.o 
Calc function of same name. (Don't have Excel on this machine.)

VLOOKUP looks up a single value in the first column of an Excel range 
and returns a column value (offset by a given integer) from the first 
matching row in that "range". The indexing functions ("extract" or 
"[" ) can be used:

df4

V1 V2  V3
1  4.56  1 0.1
2  8.42  1 0.2
3  0.79  3 0.3
4  5.39  3 0.4
5  0.95  4 0.5
6  7.73  5 0.6
7  7.17  6 0.7
8  3.89  7 0.8
9  0.54 10 1.0
10 9.53  9 0.9

df4[df4$V1==0.79,2]

[1] 3

vlookup <- function(val, df, row){
               df[df[1] == val, row][1] }

vlookup(0.79, df4, 2)

[1] 3

I thought there was an optional 4th argument to VLOOKUP that specifies 
the action to be taken if there is no exact match. You may need to 
change the equality in that function to an inequality and identify the 
first column value that is less than or equal to "val". If I remember 
correctly, Excel assumes that the first column is ordered ascending.

David Winsemius