Not dplyr
, but it's much more direct using data.table
:
library(data.table)
setDT(df)
df[ df[order(id, stopSequence), .I[c(1L,.N)], by=id]$V1 ]
# id stopId stopSequence
# 1: 1 a 1
# 2: 1 c 3
# 3: 2 b 1
# 4: 2 c 4
# 5: 3 b 1
# 6: 3 a 3
More detailed explanation:
# 1) get row numbers of first/last observations from each group
# * basically, we sort the table by id/stopSequence, then,
# grouping by id, name the row numbers of the first/last
# observations for each id; since this operation produces
# a data.table
# * .I is data.table shorthand for the row number
# * here, to be maximally explicit, I've named the variable V1
# as row_num to give other readers of my code a clearer
# understanding of what operation is producing what variable
first_last = df[order(id, stopSequence), .(row_num = .I[c(1L,.N)]), by=id]
idx = first_last$row_num
# 2) extract rows by number
df[idx]
Be sure to check out the Getting Started wiki for getting the data.table
basics covered