Le jeudi 05 avril 2012 à 12:40 -0700, Peter Meilstrup a écrit : > Consider the data.frame: > > df <- data.frame(A = c(1,4,2,6,7,3,6), B= c(3,7,2,7,3,5,4), C = > c(2,7,5,2,7,4,5), index = c("A","B","A","C","B","B","C")) > > I want to select the column specified in 'index' for every row of 'df', to > get > > goal <- c(1, 7, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5) > > This sounds a lot like the indexing-by-a-matrix you can do with arrays; > > df[cbind(1:nrow(df), df$index)] > > but this returns me values that are all characters where I want numbers. > (it seems that indexing by an array isn't well supported for data.frames.) > > What is a better way to perform this selection operation? I think the problem is that the data frame is converted to a matrix under the hood, so numeric values are converted to characters (since the reverse is not possible). You can either do: as.numeric(df[cbind(1:nrow(df), df$index)]) [1] 1 7 2 2 3 5 5
Or avoid the conversion by excluding the character column beforehand: df[-ncol(df)][cbind(1:nrow(df), df$index)] [1] 1 7 2 2 3 5 5 Regards ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.