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Move Column to First Position of DataFrame in R

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In this article, we are going to see how to move particular column in the dataframe to the first position of the dataframe in R Programming language.

Create dataframe for demonstration:

R




# create a dataframe with 4 columns
# they are id,name,age and address
data = data.frame(id=c(1, 2, 3),
                  name=c("sravan", "bobby",
                         "satwik"),
                  age=c(23, 21, 17),
                  address=c("kakumanu", "ponnur", "hyd"))
  
# display
data


Output:

Method 1: Using Base R

In this method we will move the columns to the first position using base R language.

Syntax: dataframe[ , c(“column_name”, names(dataframe)[names(dataframe) != “column_name”])]

where

  • dataframe is the input dataframe
  • column_name is the name of the column to be shifted to the first

We are going to move a particular column to first position using index operator and by c() function, we will combine the column name and then pushed to first position in the dataframe.

Example: R program to shift the columns to first for the above-created dataframe.

R




# create a dataframe with 4 columns
# they are id,name,age and address
  
data = data.frame(id = c(1,2,3),
                  name = c("sravan","bobby",
                           "satwik"),
                  age = c(23,21,17),
                  address = c("kakumanu","ponnur","hyd"))
  
# display
print("Original Dataframe")
data
  
print("After moving age to first column : ")
  
# move age to first column
data_Sorted = data[ , c("age",
                        names(data)[names(data) != "age"])]
  
# display sorted data
data_Sorted
  
print("After move address to first column : ")
  
# move address to first column
data_Sorted1 = data[ , c("address"
                         names(data)[names(data) != "address"])]
  
# display sorted data
data_Sorted1


Output:

Method 2 : Using dplyr() package 

By using this package we can shift particular column to the first, Here we are using %>% operator to load the shifted data into dataframe and use the select () function that takes the particular column name to be shifted and every() thing is used to get the dataframe data

Syntax: dataframe%>% dplyr::select(“column_name”, everything())

where

  • dataframe is the input dataframe
  • column_name is the column to be shifted to first

Example: R program to shift particular column to first

R




# load the dplyr package
library("dplyr")
  
# create a dataframe with 4 columns
# they are id,name,age and address
  
data = data.frame(id = c(1,2,3),
                  name = c("sravan","bobby",
                           "satwik"),
                  age = c(23,21,17),
                  address = c("kakumanu","ponnur","hyd"))
  
# display
print("Original Dataframe")
data
  
print("After moving age to first column : ")
  
# move age to first column
data_Sorted = data %>% dplyr::select("age"
                                     everything())
  
# display sorted data
data_Sorted


Output:



Last Updated : 23 Aug, 2021
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