From bill at insightful.com  Mon Feb 27 18:57:57 2006
From: bill at insightful.com (Bill Dunlap)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 09:57:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Rd] PR#6614
In-Reply-To: <x2fymbrn8w.fsf@turmalin.kubism.ku.dk>
References: <20060222184741.5EFB93F705@slim.kubism.ku.dk>
	<971536df0602221113g18fa674doa0deb0febae49bd9@mail.gmail.com>
	<x2fymbrn8w.fsf@turmalin.kubism.ku.dk>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.56.0602270937030.14562@octopus>

On Wed, 23 Feb 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> "Gabor Grothendieck" <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Try this:
> >
> >  subset(iris, select = - Species)
>
> Or, canonically,
>
> nm <- names(iris)
> iris[, nm != "Species" ]
>
> iris[, -match("Species", nm)]
>
> >
> > On 2/22/06, davidhughjones at gmail.com <davidhughjones at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I agree with the submitter that this needs some kind of solution.
> > > Although data.frame[,-12] works, how do I drop a named column (the
> > > most common use case)? (I found this bug while searching for an
> > > answer.)

That code with match only works if "Species" is actually
a column of iris.  If not, your result depends on whether
you have a data.frame (an error) or a matrix (a column
of NA's).

I found some mail in a 15 year old sent-mail file that suggested
allowing the tag 'except=' on any of the arguments to "[" to
replace/extend the limited negative integer convention.  The idea was
that
    iris[ except=c(10:20), except=c("Petal.Width","Petal.Length")) ]
would return all rows except 10:20 and all columns except
the ones named.
    iris[ except=integer(0), ]
would return all rows of iris, while iris[-integer(0), ] returns
no rows of iris.

This abuses the tag= notation, but the "[" function doesn't
really support the i= and j= tags that some people expect.

This would take care of the problem that subset(data.frame,select=-name)
only lets you omit columns.

The mail had a version of [.data.frame (for Splus 2.1?) that
implemented this, although, if it is to be used it should be
implemented in the most primitive [ code so all methods use it.

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Bill Dunlap
Insightful Corporation
bill at insightful dot com
360-428-8146

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[Rd] PR#6614
Bill Dunlap