Question

Consider any dataframe

            col1   col2    col3   col4
row.name11    A     23      x       y
row.name12    A     29      x       y
row.name13    B     17      x       y
row.name14    A     77      x       y

I have a list of rownames which I want to return from this dataframe. Lets say I have row.name12 and row.name13 in a list. I can easily return these rows from dataframe. But I also want to return 4 rows above and 4 rows below these rows. It means I want to return from row.name8 to row.name17. I think it is similar to grep -A -B in shell.

Probable solution- Is there any way to return row number by row name? Because if I have row number than I can easily subtract 4 and add 4 in row number and return rows.

Note: Here rownames are just examples. Rownames could be anything like RED, BLUE, BLACK, etc.

Answer 1

Try that:

extract.with.context <- function(x, rows, after = 0, before = 0) {

  match.idx  <- which(rownames(x) %in% rows)
  span       <- seq(from = -before, to = after)
  extend.idx <- c(outer(match.idx, span, `+`))
  extend.idx <- Filter(function(i) i > 0 & i <= nrow(x), extend.idx)
  extend.idx <- sort(unique(extend.idx))

  return(x[extend.idx, , drop = FALSE])
}

dat <- data.frame(x = 1:26, row.names = letters)
extract.with.context(dat, c("a", "b", "j", "y"), after = 3, before = 1)
#    x
# a  1
# b  2
# c  3
# d  4
# e  5
# i  9
# j 10
# k 11
# l 12
# m 13
# x 24
# y 25
# z 26