Question

I have an xts in the following format

                   a        b     c        d       e        f   ......
2011-01-03         11.40    NA    23.12    0.23    123.11   NA  ......
2011-01-04         11.49    NA    23.15    1.11    111.11   NA  ......
2011-01-05         NA       NA    23.11    1.23    142.32   NA  ......
2011-01-06         11.64    NA    39.01    NA      124.21   NA  ......
2011-01-07         13.84    NA    12.12    1.53    152.12   NA  ......

Is there a function I can apply to generate a new xts or data.frame missing the columns containing only NA?

The position of the columns with the NAs isn’t static so just removing those columns by name or position isn’t possible

Answer 1

Supose DF is your data.frame

 DF [, -which(sapply(DF, function(x) sum(is.na(x)))==nrow(DF))]
               a     c    d      e
2011-01-03 11.40 23.12 0.23 123.11
2011-01-04 11.49 23.15 1.11 111.11
2011-01-05    NA 23.11 1.23 142.32
2011-01-06 11.64 39.01   NA 124.21
2011-01-07 13.84 12.12 1.53 152.12