I have three variables in a data frame and would like to swap the 4 columns around from
"dam" "piglet" "fdate" "ssire"
to
"piglet" "ssire" "dam" "tdate"
Is there any way I can do the swapping using R?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Baz
dfrm <- dfrm[c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "tdate")]
OR:
dfrm <- dfrm[ , c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "tdate")]
d <- data.frame(a=1:3, b=11:13, c=21:23)
d
# a b c
#1 1 11 21
#2 2 12 22
#3 3 13 23
d2 <- d[,c("b", "c", "a")]
d2
# b c a
#1 11 21 1
#2 12 22 2
#3 13 23 3
or you can do same thing using index:
d3 <- d[,c(2, 3, 1)]
d3
# b c a
#1 11 21 1
#2 12 22 2
#3 13 23 3
To summarise the other posts, there are three ways of changing the column order, and two ways of specifying the indexing in each method.
Given a sample data frame
dfr <- data.frame(
dam = 1:5,
piglet = runif(5),
fdate = letters[1:5],
ssire = rnorm(5)
)
Kohske's answer: You can use standard matrix-like indexing using column numbers
dfr[, c(2, 4, 1, 3)]
or using column names
dfr[, c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "fdate")]
DWin & Gavin's answer: Data frames allow you to omit the row argument when specifying the index.
dfr[c(2, 4, 1, 3)]
dfr[c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "fdate")]
PaulHurleyuk's answer: You can also use subset
.
subset(dfr, select = c(2, 4, 1, 3))
subset(dfr, select = c(c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "fdate")))
You can use subset's 'select' argument;
#Assume df contains "dam" "piglet" "fdate" "ssire"
newdf<-subset(df, select=c("piglet", "ssire", "dam", "tdate"))
I quickly wrote a function that takes a vector v and column indexes a and b which you want to swap.
swappy = function(v,a,b){ # where v is a dataframe, a and b are the
columns indexes to swap
name = deparse(substitute(v))
helpy = v[,a]
v[,a] = v[,b]
v[,b] = helpy
name1 = colnames(v)[a]
name2 = colnames(v)[b]
colnames(v)[a] = name2
colnames(v)[b] = name1
assign(name,value = v , envir =.GlobalEnv)
}