Question

I would like to incorporate variable names that imply what I should do with them. I imagine a dataframe “survey”.

library(Rlab) # Needed for rbern() function.
survey <- data.frame(cbind(  
id = seq(1:10),  
likert_this = sample(seq(1:7),10, replace=T),  
likert_that = sample(seq(1:7), 10, replace=T),  
dim_bern_varx = rbern(10, 0.6),  
disc_1 = sample(letters[1:5],10,replace=T)))

Now I would like to do certain things with all variables that contain likert, other things with variables that contain bern etc.

How can this be done in R?

Answer 1

You can use grep() with colnames():

survey[,grep("bern", colnames(survey))]