Recoding "all other values" of a Variable into one value

[Uwe]

Hi everyone,
first day in here and already a question. I have a problem quite similar to this:
(SOLVED: Recode variable from text to numbers)
I found that in here on my quest for a solution.
But unlike the original User, my data contains also free text strings, which i want to recode with a certain number. So my Data looks like

Data$Variable <- c(Germany, Switzerland, Bolivia, Togo,...)

and i want to recode it like

"Germany"=1, "Switzerland"=2 ...

but, here's the thing: Bolivia, Togo and some other more exotic Countries should get assigned the Number "3".
I have solved the recoding/mutating part, but i can't find a appropriate expression for "all the rest"=3.
I have tried several if-then-else or dplyr::ifelse constructions, but those didn't work out. Mainly because i'm confused by logical arguments, vectors, data frames and all that stuff.
So, my question is: is there an expression for "all other values" or how can i solve it in another fashion?
I'm quite new to R and RStudio (as you can tell from my question) and i hope helping me isn't too boring...
Best regards

[andresrcs]

Hi, thanks for trying to provide some properly formatted sample data but you have missed some details to make it actually usable by us, for future reference on how to provide a proper reproducible example, please read the guide on this link

FAQ: How to do a minimal reproducible example ( reprex ) for beginners

A minimal reproducible example consists of the following items: A minimal dataset, necessary to reproduce the issue The minimal runnable code necessary to reproduce the issue, which can be run on the given dataset, and including the necessary information on the used packages. Let's quickly go over each one of these with examples: Minimal Dataset (Sample Data) You need to provide a data frame that is small enough to be (reasonably) pasted on a post, but big enough to reproduce your issue. Let's say, as an example, that you are working with the iris data frame head(iris) #> Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species #> 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.…

About your problem at hand, you can use the case_when() function from dplyr, see this example (Please notice the way I'm sharing it with you, that would be a proper reprex).

library(dplyr)

# Sample data on a copy/paste friendly format
Data <- data.frame(
    Variable = c("Germany", "Switzerland", "Bolivia", "Togo")
)

# Relevant code
Data %>% 
    mutate(
        new_variable = case_when(
            Variable == "Germany" ~ 1,
            Variable == "Switzerland" ~ 2,
            TRUE ~ 3
        )
    )
#>      Variable new_variable
#> 1     Germany            1
#> 2 Switzerland            2
#> 3     Bolivia            3
#> 4        Togo            3

^{Created on 2022-04-30 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

[Uwe]

Great, i appreciate your quick help.
I will try this approach on Monday, but it looks feasible to me. I promise to give better reprex next time