R dplyr Drop multiple columns

Question

I have a dataframe and list of columns in that dataframe that I d like to drop  Let s use the iris dataset as an example  I d like to drop Sepal Length and Sepal Width and use only the remaining columns  How do I do this using select or select  from the dplyr package   Here s what I ve tried so far   drop cols  lt - c  Sepal Length    Sepal Width   iris   gt   select -drop cols       Error in -drop cols   invalid argument to unary operator   iris   gt   select   dots   -drop cols       Error in -drop cols   invalid argument to unary operator   iris   gt   select  drop cols       Error in  drop cols   invalid argument type   iris   gt   select   dots    drop cols       Error in  drop cols   invalid argument type   I feel like I m missing something obvious because these seems like a pretty useful operation that should already exist  On Github  someone posted a similar issue  and Hadley said to use  negative indexing   That s what  I think  I ve tried  but to no avail  Any suggestions

User · Answer

You can try   iris   gt   select -  drop cols

User · Answer

Check the help on select vars  That gives you some extra ideas on how to work with this   In your case   iris   gt   select -one of drop cols

User · Answer

We can try  iris   gt          select   dots  setdiff names    drop cols

User · Answer

Beyond select -one of drop cols   there are a couple other options for dropping columns using select   that do not involve defining all the specific column names  using the dplyr starwars sample data for some more variety in column names            starwars   gt      select - name mass     gt            the range of columns from  name  to  mass    select -contains  color      gt      any column name that contains  color    select -starts with  bi      gt      any column name that starts with  bi    select -ends with  er      gt        any column name that ends with  er    select -matches   f  s       gt      any column name matching the regex pattern   select if   is list       gt         not by column name but by data type   head 2     A tibble  2 x 2 homeworld species    lt chr gt       lt chr gt    1 Tatooine  Human   2 Tatooine  Droid

User · Answer

Be careful with the select   function  because it s used both in the dplyr and MASS packages  so if MASS is loaded  select   may not work properly  To find out what packages are loaded  type sessionInfo   and look for it in the  other attached packages   section  If it is loaded  type detach   package MASS   unload   TRUE    and your select   function should work again

User · Answer

Another way is to mutate the undesired columns to NULL  this avoids the embedded parentheses    head iris 2    gt   mutate at drop cols   NULL      Petal Length Petal Width Species   1          1 4         0 2  setosa   2          1 4         0 2  setosa

User · Answer

If you have a special character in the column names  either select or select may not work as expected  This property of dplyr of using      To refer to the data set in the question  the following line can be used to solve this problem   drop cols  lt - c  Sepal Length    Sepal Width     iris   gt      setdiff names    drop cols

User · Answer

also try     Notice the lack of quotes iris   gt   select  -c Sepal Length  Sepal Width

[r] R dplyr: Drop multiple columns

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