How to Remove Specific Elements from Vector in R?

In this article, we will discuss how to remove specific elements from vectors in R Programming Language.

Remove elements using in operator

This operator will select specific elements and uses ! operator to exclude those elements.

Syntax:

vector[! vector %in% c(elements)]

In this example, we will be using the in operator to remove the elements in the given vector in the R programming language.

R

# create a vector
vector1=c(1,34,56,2,45,67,89,22,21,38)

# display
print(vector1)

# remove the elements
print(vector1[! vector1%in% c(34,45,67)])

Output:

[1]  1 34 56  2 45 67 89 22 21 38

[1]  1 56  2 89 22 21 38

Note: We can also specify the range of elements to be removed.

Syntax:

vector[! vector %in% c(start:stop)]

R

# create a vector
vector1 = c(1, 34, 56, 2, 45, 67, 89, 22, 21, 38)

# display
print(vector1)

# remove the elements
print(vector1[! vector1 %in% c(1:50)])

Output:

[1]  1 34 56  2 45 67 89 22 21 38

[1] 56 67 89

Using conditions to remove the elements

In this method, the user needs to use the specific conditions accordingly to remove the elements from a given vector.

Syntax:

vector[!condition]

where

condition: specifies the condition that element be checked

R

# create a vector
vector1=c(1,34,56,2,45,67,89,22,21,38)

# display
print(vector1)

# remove the elements with element greater
# than 50 or less than 20
print(vector1[!(vector1 > 50 | vector1 < 20)])

Output:

[1]  1 34 56  2 45 67 89 22 21 38

[1] 34 45 22 21 38

Remove element from vector by index

To remove elements from a vector by index in R, we can use negative indexing or the subsetting technique. Here’s an example.

R

# Create a vector
vector1 <- c(1, 34, 56, 2, 45, 67, 89, 22, 21, 38)

# Display the original vector
print("Original Vector:")
print(vector1)

# Remove elements by index
vector1 <- vector1[-c(3,5)]

# Display the modified vector
print("Modified Vector:")
print(vector1)

Output:

[1] "Original Vector:"
 [1]  1 34 56  2 45 67 89 22 21 38

[1] "Modified Vector:"
[1]  1 34  2 67 89 22 21 38