That only requires two small changes in Sarah's first solution: > Finaldata[, !colnames(Finaldata) %in% V$v2[V$v1 == 1]] Length Rate 1 0.53607323 0.01739951 2 0.15405615 0.11837908 3 0.04542388 0.53702702 4 0.15633703 0.68870041 5 0.35293973 0.38258981
------------------------------------- David L Carlson Department of Anthropology Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77840-4352 -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Sneha Bishnoi Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2014 11:06 AM To: Sarah Goslee Cc: r-help Subject: Re: [R] Subsetting a dataframe by dynamic column name Hi Sarah, Thanks! Do agree its over complicated. However looking at the solutions I think I did not state my problem completely. V provides choices for only certain set of columns in Finaldata. So v2 may not represent all columns of Finaldata. I want to retain columns not provided as a choice for users plus the ones user chooses to keep. Thanks! On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.gos...@gmail.com>wrote: > There are many ways. You're making it overly complicated > > Here, in an actual reproducible example (as you were requested to submit): > > V <- data.frame(v1=c(1,0,0), v2=c("Shape", "Length", "Rate"), > stringsAsFactors=FALSE) > Finaldata <- data.frame(Shape = runif(5), Length = runif(5), Rate = > runif(5)) > > # assuming names in V are not in the same order as columns in Finaldata > # also assuming there might accidentally be names not in Finaldata > Finaldata[, colnames(Finaldata) %in% V$v2[V$v1 == 0]] > > # more elegant? > Finaldata[, colnames(Finaldata) %in% V$v2[!V$v1]] > > # not robust to errors in V > Finaldata[, V$v2[!V$v1]] > > # assumes order of column names matches order of V > Finaldata[, -V$v1] > > Sarah > > On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Sneha Bishnoi <sneha.bish...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Hi all! > > > > I am trying to drop columns from a data frame dynamically depending on > user > > input. The dataframe whose columns need to be dropped is called > "Finaldata" > > So here is what I do: > > > > V is a dataframe with columns v1 and v2 as follows > > > > v1 v2 > > 1 1 Shape > > 2 0 Length > > 3 0 Rate > > > > v1 corresponds to user input, 1 if you want to drop the column, 0 > otherwise > > v2 corresponds to column names of the all the columns in "Finaldata" > > I then use following code to drop columns > > > > for (i in 1:3) > > { > > if(V$v1[i]==1) > > { > > print(V$v2[i]) > > Finaldata<-subset(Finaldata,select=-c(V$v2[i])) > > } > > > > } > > > > However v2 being type character is not accepted by subset. > > I read subset needs column names without quotes. > > I tried stripping off quotes through gsub and cat,however it din't help > > There are lot of columns and I cannot perform this individually on all > > columns. > > How do i go about it? > > > > > > Thanks! > > SB > > > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org > -- Sneha Bishnoi +14047235469 H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering Georgia Tech [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.