Hi Sachin, There are at least two ways. The safer way is to use a regular expression to find the matching columns, like this:
a <- initial_data[grep("^OFB[0-9]+", names(initial_data))] Alternatively, if you know that the columns you want are the first 8 you can select them by position, like this: a <- initial_data[1:8] Best, Ista On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 7:59 AM, Sachinthaka Abeywardana <sachin.abeyward...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I have a data frame that has the columns OFB1, OFB2, OFB3,... OFB10. > > How do I select the first 8 columns efficiently without typing each and > every one of them. i.e. I want something like: > > a<-data.frame(initial_data$OFB1-10) #i know this is wrong, what would be > the correct syntax? > > Thanks, > Sachin > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.