Subset Dataframe using list of character elements

Asked Jan 17 '17 at 01:50

Active Jan 17 '17 at 01:54

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I have a dataframe k with a column d full of character elements and a list d' containing the names that I'm interested in.

The answer ought to be:

k <- k[k$d %in% d']

The result of which is:

A tibble: 0 × 39
... with 39 variables: ... d < chr > ...

I'm thinking there's something going wrong in the data, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing something wrong.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

Community

asked Jan 17 '17 at 01:50

MokeEire

`k$d %in% unlist(d')` will work – joel.wilson Jan 17 '17 at 01:51
Perfect! Could you explain why it worked/what the difference is? – MokeEire Jan 17 '17 at 01:54
`unlist` turns the list into a vector which is what `%in%` expects to have – joel.wilson Jan 17 '17 at 01:56
So `%in%` will not match values in lists? Only vectors? – MokeEire Jan 17 '17 at 01:57
1

How on earth is `d'` a valid object name? – thelatemail Jan 17 '17 at 01:58
@thelatemail I was just shortening the actual object names and because they were similar d' (prime) seemed appropriate – MokeEire Jan 17 '17 at 02:05
no no! %in% will work with `lists`, but that depends on whether you `lists` inside `lists` too. I dont think those cases work – joel.wilson Jan 17 '17 at 02:06
So I am a little confused, %in% expects to have a vector, but will work with lists, so why did this particular case not work until the list became a vector? – MokeEire Jan 17 '17 at 02:13

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