Use Grep to Drop Columns

It’s very easy to drop columns from a data frame using the grep() function. The following example shows you how.

# print the first 3 records of the iris dataset 
head(iris, 3)

##   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa

# grep the indices of the columns with "Sepal" in their names
sepal_col_num = grep("Sepal", names(iris))

# drop these columns
iris_sub = iris[, -sepal_col_num]
head(iris_sub, 3)

##   Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 2          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 3          1.3         0.2  setosa

You can also use grep() to extract column names.

# grep the names of the columns with "Petal" in their names
grep("Petal", names(iris), value=T)

## [1] "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width"

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