r - updating column in one dataframe with value from another dataframe based on matching values

Question

I have a data frame "z"

   letter color
1       a     0
2       e     0
3       b     0
4       b     0
5       d     0
6       d     0
7       a     0
8       b     0
9       c     0
10      d     0
11      c     0
12      c     0
13      c     0
14      c     0
15      e     0
16      e     0
17      a     0
18      d     0
19      e     0
20      b     0

and another data frame "y"

  letter color
1      a   red
2      b  blue
3      c green

when the letter in z matches with a letter in y I would like to append the color from y into the corresponding color field in z but I do not want to remove any values from z. If a match doesn't occur, z$color should remain unchanged. I used"0" as a place holder in z$color, this could be text instead.

I've been attempting things for loops, the match() command and statements with %in% but I'm not quite achieving the results I'm after.

Any ideas?

This is the code I used for the data frames

set.seed(3)
z=data.frame(sample(c("a","b","c","d","e"),20,replace=T))
names(z)="letter"
z$color=rep(0,dim(z)[1])
z

y1=c("a","b","c")
y2=c("red","blue","green")
y=data.frame(cbind(y1,y2))
names(y)=c("letter","color")
y

Answer 1

you don't need z$color in the first place if its just place holder, you can replace NA later with 0

z$color<-y[match(z$letter, y$letter),2]