Removing variables from data frame with a wile card

You'll want to use grep() or grepl(). By default, grep() uses extended
regular expressions to find matches, but you can also use perl regular
expressions and globbing (after converting to a regular expression).
For example:

grepl("^yr", colnames(mydata))

will tell you which 'colnames' start with "yr". If you'd rather you
use globbing:

grepl(glob2rx("yr*"), colnames(mydata))

Then you might write something like this to remove the columns starting with yr:

mydata <- mydata[, !grepl("^yr", colnames(mydata)), drop = FALSE]

Removing variables from data frame with a wile card

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