Question

Is there any way to select all rows from a dataframe whose name in one column don’t have a word?

Example:

From this data frame

Organism    Value
Boa (sick)  3
Cat         1
Cat (sick)  2
Wolf        2
Wolf (sick) 8
Crow        4

I want the rows without (sick) in its name:

Organism    Value
Cat         1
Wolf        2
Crow        4

I know that the data is in the wrong format and it would be better to have a third column for “health” but I have to work with the data that I have.

Answer 1

d <- data.frame(Organism=c("Boa (sick)", "Cat", "Cat (sick)", "Wolf", "Wolf (sick)", "Crow"), Value=c(3, 1, 2, 2, 8, 4), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

d[!grepl(pattern="(sick)", x=d$Organism, fixed=TRUE), ]
#  Organism Value
#2      Cat     1
#4     Wolf     2
#6     Crow     4