Question

Given a data frame "foo", how can I select only those rows from "foo" where e.g. foo$location = "there"?

foo = data.frame(location = c("here", "there", "here", "there", "where"), x = 1:5, y = 6:10)
foo
#   location x  y
# 1     here 1  6
# 2    there 2  7
# 3     here 3  8
# 4    there 4  9
# 5    where 5 10

Desired result, "bar":

#   location x y
# 2    there 2 7
# 4    there 4 9

Answer 1

Here are the two main approaches. I prefer this one for its readability:

bar <- subset(foo, location == "there")

Note that you can string together many conditionals with & and | to create complex subsets.

The second is the indexing approach. You can index rows in R with either numeric, or boolean slices. foo$location == "there" returns a vector of T and F values that is the same length as the rows of foo. You can do this to return only rows where the condition returns true.

foo[foo$location == "there", ]