Home » How to Select All But One Column in R (With Examples)

How to Select All But One Column in R (With Examples)

by Tutor Aspire

You can use the following methods to select all but one column in a data frame in R:

Method 1: Select All But One Column by Position

#select all but the third column
df[, -3]

Method 2: Select All But One Column by Name

#select all but column named 'this_column'
df[, colnames(df)[colnames(df) != 'this_column']] 

The following examples show how to use each method in practice with the following data frame in R:

#create data frame
df frame(team=c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'),
                 points=c(99, 90, 86, 88, 95),
                 assists=c(33, 28, 31, 39, 34),
                 rebounds=c(30, 28, 24, 24, 28))

#view data frame
df

  team points assists rebounds
1    A     99      33       30
2    B     90      28       28
3    C     86      31       24
4    D     88      39       24
5    E     95      34       28

Example 1: Select All But One Column by Position

The following code shows how to select all but the column in the third position of the data frame:

#select all but the third column
df[, -3]

  team points rebounds
1    A     99       30
2    B     90       28
3    C     86       24
4    D     88       24
5    E     95       28

Notice that all of the columns except the one in the third position of the data frame have been selected.

Example 2: Select All But One Column by Name

The following code shows how to select all but the column with the name ‘assists’ in the data frame:

#select all columns except the column with the name 'assists'
df[, colnames(df)[colnames(df) != 'assists']]

  team points rebounds
1    A     99       30
2    B     90       28
3    C     86       24
4    D     88       24
5    E     95       28

Notice that all of the columns except the one with the name ‘assists’ have been selected.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in R:

How to Add Column to Data Frame Based on Other Columns in R
How to Sort by Multiple Columns in R
How to Reorder Columns in R

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