Hi Jim, and thanks for your solution. I figured one out for myself about a minute after I posted this, and here it is if anyone else can find it valuable:
subsetData<- bigData[,grep(partialName, colnames(bigData))] This is smaller than your solution, but similar I think. Cheers, Sarah On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 6:34 PM, Jim Lemon <j...@bitwrit.com.au> wrote: > On 03/04/2010 05:51 PM, Sarah Henderson wrote: >> >> Hi all -- >> >> I think my Python brain is missing something crucial about string >> operations in R, but I cannot figure this out. >> >> I have a large data frame with several groups of similar variables. >> Similar variables are named according to their group, and I am now >> writing a function to check correlations within groups. I want to >> subset the data frame by partial variable name, something along the >> lines of this: >> >> partialName<- "XXX" >> subsetData<- bigData[, partialName in colnames(bigData)] >> >> Where bigData might have 10 columns named "XXX1", "XXX2" etc. >> > > Hi Sarah, > > Try this: > > column.names<-paste(sample(c("X","Y","Z"),100,TRUE), > sample(c("X","Y","Z"),100,TRUE), > sample(c("X","Y","Z"),100,TRUE), > sample(0:9,100,TRUE),sep="") > column.names[grep("XXX",column.names,fixed=TRUE)] > > Jim > ______________________________________________ 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.