Order data frame rows according to vector with specific order

I prefer to use ***_join in dplyr whenever I need to match data. One possible try for this

left_join(data.frame(name=target),df,by="name")

Note that the input for ***_join require tbls or data.frame

We can adjust the factor levels based on target and use it in arrange

library(dplyr)
df %>% arrange(factor(name, levels = target))

#  name value
#1    b  TRUE
#2    c FALSE
#3    a  TRUE
#4    d FALSE

Or order it and use it in slice

df %>% slice(order(factor(name, levels = target)))

Try match:

df <- data.frame(name=letters[1:4], value=c(rep(TRUE, 2), rep(FALSE, 2)))
target <- c("b", "c", "a", "d")
df[match(target, df$name),]

  name value
2    b  TRUE
3    c FALSE
1    a  TRUE
4    d FALSE

It will work as long as your target contains exactly the same elements as df$name, and neither contain duplicate values.

From ?match:

match returns a vector of the positions of (first) matches of its first argument 
in its second.

Therefore match finds the row numbers that matches target's elements, and then we return df in that order.