Extracting specific columns from a data frame

Question

I want to construct a new dataframe in R that only contains three of the six columns in my current data frame.

The only command I can think of to extract columns A, B, and E from a data frame called df is this:

data.frame(df$A,df$B,df$E)

Is there a more efficient method to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a more efficient method to extract specific columns from a data frame in R. You can use the indexing operator [ ] with the column names to subset the desired columns. Here's an example:

new_df <- df[, c("A", "B", "E")]

In this example, df is the original data frame, and we use the indexing operator [, ] to subset specific columns. Inside the square brackets, we provide the column names "A", "B", and "E" as a vector within the c() function. The resulting new_df data frame will only contain the columns A, B, and E from the original data frame.

This method avoids creating multiple data frames using the data.frame() function and provides a more concise and efficient way to extract specific columns.

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