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does column exist?

5 messages · Omar Lakkis, Chuck Cleland, apjaworski@mmm.com +2 more

#
How do I test if a data.frame has a column named X?
exists(o) checks if the object exists or not, I want to test if a
data.frame object (df) has a column names(X), something like:
exists(df$X)
#
How about is.null(df$X)==FALSE ?
Omar Lakkis wrote:

  
    
#
There may be a simpler way, but this

is.na(match("X", names(df)))

should return TRUE if the column name exists and FALSE otherwise.

Cheers,

Andy

__________________________________
Andy Jaworski
518-1-01
Process Laboratory
3M Corporate Research Laboratory
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E-mail: apjaworski at mmm.com
Tel:  (651) 733-6092
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             Omar Lakkis                                                   
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                                       [R] does column exist?              
             05/19/2005 12:42                                              
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                Omar Lakkis                                                
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How do I test if a data.frame has a column named X?
exists(o) checks if the object exists or not, I want to test if a
data.frame object (df) has a column names(X), something like:
exists(df$X)

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#
It depends on what Omar means by "a column named X".  Consider the 
following:

 > tstDF <- data.frame(aa=1, bb=2)
 > tstDF$a
[1] 1
 > is.null(tstDF$a)
[1] FALSE
 > is.na(match("a", names(tstDF)))
[1] TRUE

	  Does tstDF have a column named "a"?  It has a column named "aa", 
which is accessed by tstDF$a;  is.null(tstDF$a) correctly identifies its 
presence, while is.na(match("a", names(tstDF))) correctly says that "a" 
is not the official name of any column of tstDF.

	  spencer graves
apjaworski at mmm.com wrote:

            
#
On Thu, 19 May 2005 apjaworski at mmm.com wrote:

            
Mere syntactic sugar, but "X" %in% names(mydf) is self-documenting.