[R] Listing Variables

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Column names in iris that contain the string Sepal:

grep("Sepal", names(iris), value = TRUE)


On 5/3/06, Farrel Buchinsky <fjbuch at gmail.com> wrote:
> How does one create a vector whose contents is the list of variables in a
> dataframe pertaining to a particular pattern?
> This is so simple but I cannot find a straightforward answer.
> I want to be able to pass the contents of that list to a "for" loop.
>
> So let us assume that one has a dataframe whose name is Data. And let us
> assume one had the height of a group of people measured at various ages.
>
> It could be made up of vectors Data$PersonalID, Data$FirstName,
> Data$LastName, Data$Height.1, Data$Height.5, Data$Height.9,
> Data$Height.10,Data$Height.12,Data$Height.20....many many more variables.
>
> How would one create a vector of all the Height variable names.
>
> The simple workaround is to not bother creating the vector "Data$Height.1"
> "Data$Height.5" "Data$Height.9" "Data$Height.10"
> "Data$Height.12""Data$Height.20"...but rather just to use the sapply
> function. However with some functions the sapply will not work and it is
> necessary to supply each variable name to a function (see thread at
> Repeating tdt function on thousands of variables)
>
>
> This is such a core capability. I would like to see it in the R-Wiki but
> could not find it there.
>
> --
> Farrel Buchinsky, MD
> Pediatric Otolaryngologist
> Allegheny General Hospital
> Pittsburgh, PA
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>