select() not working in R

Question

[j.lunger18]

Trying to make a new dataframe with a subset of columns in an existing dataframe. This worked for me before, not sure what's going wrong now...

**head(mt_coding_variants[1:3])
# A tibble: 6 x 3
        POS ID          REF  
      <int> <chr>       <chr>
1 119606751 rs751351167 A    
2 119606751 rs751351167 A    
3 119606751 rs751351167 A    
4 119606751 rs751351167 A    
5 119609095 rs747135103 C    
6 119609095 rs747135103 C    
> x <- select(mt_coding_variants, mt_coding_variants$REF)
Error: Unknown columns `A`, `A`, `A`, `A`, `C` and ... 
Call `rlang::last_error()` to see a backtrace.
> rlang::last_error()
<error/rlang_error>
Unknown columns `A`, `A`, `A`, `A`, `C` and ... 
Backtrace:
 1. dplyr::select(mt_coding_variants, mt_coding_variants$REF)
 2. dplyr:::select.data.frame(mt_coding_variants, mt_coding_variants$REF)
 3. tidyselect::vars_select(tbl_vars(.data), !!!enquos(...))
 4. tidyselect:::vars_select_eval(.vars, quos)
 5. purrr::map_if(ind_list, is_character, match_strings, names = TRUE)
 6. purrr::map(.x[sel], .f, ...)
 7. tidyselect:::.f(.x[[i]], ...)
 8. tidyselect:::bad_unknown_vars(vars, unknown)**

[zx8754]

Or use base subset:

x <- mt_coding_variants[, "REF" ]

Answer 1

[antonioggsousa]

Hi,

select() is a method to select a column based on their name, ie, column name, and you are indexing the column. So, just do:

x <- select(mt_coding_variants, REF)

This is enough to select your column.

António