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rselectdplyr

dplyr: select all variables except for those contained in vector

This should be a simple issue but I am struggling.

I have a vector of variable names that I want to exclude from a data frame:

df <- data.frame(matrix(rexp(50), nrow = 10, ncol = 5))
names(df) <- paste0(rep("variable_", 5), 1:5)

excluded_vars <- c("variable_1", "variable_3")

I would have thought that just excluding the object in the select statement with - would have worked:

select(df, -excluded_vars)

But I get the following error:

Error in -excluded_vars : invalid argument to unary operator

the same is true when using select_()

Any ideas?

Solution

  • select(df, -any_of(excluded_vars)) is now the safest way to do this (the code will not break if a variable name that doesn't exist in df is included in excluded_vars)