Define another column that's a "sorted paste" of the names, which would have the same value of "Bob~Fred~Sam" for rows 1 and 5. Then aggregate based on that.
Brief code snippet (assumes original data frame is dd
): it's all really intuitive. We create a lookup
column (take a look and should be self explanatory), get the sums of the total
column for each combination, and then filter down to the unique combinations...
dd$lookup=apply(dd[,c("name1","name2","name3")],1,
function(x){paste(sort(x),collapse="~")})
tab1=tapply(dd$total,dd$lookup,sum)
ee=dd[match(unique(dd$lookup),dd$lookup),]
ee$newtotal=as.numeric(tab1)[match(ee$lookup,names(tab1))]
You now have in ee
a set of unique rows and their corresponding total counts. Easy - and no external packages needed. And crucially, you can see at every stage of the process what is going on!
(Minor update to help OP:) And if you want a cleaned-up version of the final answer:
outdf = with(ee,data.frame(name1,name2,name3,
total=newtotal,stringsAsFactors=FALSE))
This gives you a neat data frame with the three all-important name columns, and with the aggregated totals in a column called total
rather than newtotal
.