Remove multiple columns from a df

October 22, 2022

I have a dataframe and I wish to remove 2 columns from it using the names, following another post on here it suggests the following code should work (or be close to working), would anyone be able to point me in the right direction here.

My df column dames

head(economics_df)

  `Series Name`  `Series Code` Country `Country Code` `1997` `1998` `1999` `2000` `2001` `2002` `2003` `2004` `2005` `2006` `2007` `2008` `2009` `2010` `2011` `2012`
  1 GDP (current … NY.GDP.MKTP.… Spain   ESP            5.900… 6.192… 6.349… 5.983… 6.278… 7.087… 9.074… 1.069… 1.153… 1.260…

code to remove unwanted columns

economics_df = economics_df %>% select(-c(`Series Code`, `Country Code`))

other ways tried

economics_df = economics_df[-c("`Series Code`", "`Country Code`")]

>Solution :

Would this work? It’s hard to know without the structure of the column names.

library(dplyr)

economics_df = economics_df %>% 
  dplyr::select(-c("`Series Code`", "`Country Code`"))

Or using base R:

economics_df = df[, !names(df) %in% c("`Series Code`", "`Country Code`")]

Output

  `Series Name` `Country` `1997`
1             1         1      1

Data

economics_df <- structure(list(``Series Name`` = 1, ``Series Code`` = 1, ``Country`` = 1, 
    ``Country Code`` = 1, ``1997`` = 1), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-1L))

#  `Series Name` `Series Code` `Country` `Country Code` `1997`
#1             1             1         1              1      1

OR (if you’re column names are structured slightly different), then remove the outer quotation marks:

economics_df = economics_df %>% 
  dplyr::select(-c(`Series Code`, `Country Code`))

economics_df = economics_df[, !names(economics_df) %in% c(`Series Code`, `Country Code`)]

Output

economics_df <- structure(list(`Series Name` = "1", `Series Code` = 1, Country = "1", 
    `Country Code` = 1, `1997` = 1), row.names = c(NA, -1L), class = "data.frame")