title: Question concerning merging American Community Survey person and household files in R using RStudio
body: <p>I am interested in joining person and household data using the SERIALNO variable from the 2019 5-year ACS for Texas. Here is my code for this action using RStudio Version 1.4.1106:</p>
  <pre><code># Load Person and Household data for 2019 ACS
  
  pums2019pop &lt;- read.csv(&quot;C:\\psam_p48.csv&quot;)
  pums2019hsg &lt;- read.csv(&quot;C:\\psam_h48.csv&quot;)
  
  # Join person and household data using SERIALNO
  pums2019 &lt;- inner_join(pums2017pop, pums2017hsg, by = c(&quot;SERIALNO&quot;))
  </code></pre>
  <p>Once I have completed this action, I check the output for pums2019 and immediately notice that some variables such as PUMA, DIVISION, and ADJINC, have &quot;.x&quot; appended to the end of their names so that they now appear as: &quot;PUMA.x&quot;, &quot;DIVISION.x&quot;, and &quot;ADJINC.x&quot;.</p>
  <p>While I can work with the file without issue, I just have to spell out the variable name with the appended &quot;.x&quot;, I am wondering if there is anyway to keep this from happening in the first place?</p>
  <p>Any help would be appreciated.</p>
  <p>Thank you.</p>