List all column except for one in R [duplicate]

Solution 1:

If you are looking for negative indexing by name (in addition to tcash21's numeric indexing), here's a few ways I know, some riskier than others:

mtcars[, -which(names(mtcars) == "carb")]  #only works on a single column
mtcars[, names(mtcars) != "carb"]          #only works on a single column
mtcars[, !names(mtcars) %in% c("carb", "mpg")] 
mtcars[, -match(c("carb", "mpg"), names(mtcars))] 
mtcars2 <- mtcars; mtcars2$hp <- NULL         #lost column (risky)


library(gdata) 
remove.vars(mtcars2, names=c("mpg", "carb"), info=TRUE) 

Generally I use:

mtcars[, !names(mtcars) %in% c("carb", "mpg")] 

because I feel it's safe and efficient.

Solution 2:

You can index and use a negative sign to drop the 3rd column:

data[,-3]

Or you can list only the first 2 columns:

data[,c("c1", "c2")]
data[,1:2]

Don't forget the comma and referencing data frames works like this: data[row,column]