Question

How do I grab elements from a table in R?

My data looks like this:

         V1     V2
1      12.448 13.919
2      22.242  4.606
3      24.509  0.176

etc…

I basically just want to grab elements individually. I’m getting confused with all the R terminology, like vectors, and I just want to be able to get at the individual elements.

Is there a function where I can just do like data[v1][1] and get the element in row 1 column 1?

Answer 1

Try

data[1, "V1"]  # Row first, quoted column name second, and case does matter

Further note: Terminology in discussing R can be crucial and sometimes tricky. Using the term "table" to refer to that structure leaves open the possibility that it was either a ‘table’-classed, or a ‘matrix’-classed, or a ‘data.frame’-classed object. The answer above would succeed with any of them, while @BenBolker’s suggestion below would only succeed with a ‘data.frame’-classed object.

There is a ton of free introductory material for beginners in R: CRAN: Contributed Documentation