In R, use dplyr select with contains helper function, with multiple parameters to contains

Question

The title is a bit worded, but I think decently describes what I am trying to solve. I have a dataframe with the following column names:

> colnames(mydf) 
[1] "rank"                                      "team.ID"                                          
[3] "team.City"                                 "team.Name"                                        
[5] "team.Abbreviation"                         "stats.GamesPlayed.@abbreviation"                  
[7] "stats.GamesPlayed.#text"                   "stats.AtBats.@category"                           
[9] "stats.AtBats.@abbreviation"                "stats.AtBats.#text"                               
[11] "stats.Runs.@category"                      "stats.Runs.@abbreviation"                         
[13] "stats.Runs.#text"                          "stats.Hits.@category"                             
[15] "stats.Hits.@abbreviation"                  "stats.Hits.#text"                        

This full dataframe is ~400 columns wide, but follows this structure:

• the first 5 columns are 'rank' and 4 columns that start with "team."
• the remaining columns alternate suffix between @abbreviation, #text, and @category

I would like to use one dplyr line to grab the first 5 columns AND any columns with a #text suffix, but the following doesn't work:

mydf <- mydf %>% dplyr::select(contains(c('rank', 'team.', '#text')))

Any thoughts on how this could be accomplished? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can pass multiple parameters to select() . For example

mydf %>% select(rank:team.Abbreviation, ends_with("#text"))

Tested with

mydf <- data.frame("rank"=1, "team.ID"=1,
  "team.City"="A", "team.Name"="A",
  "team.Abbreviation"="A", "stats.GamesPlayed.@abbreviation"="A",
  "stats.GamesPlayed.#text"="A", "stats.AtBats.@category"="A",
  "stats.AtBats.@abbreviation"="A", "stats.AtBats.#text"="A", 
  "stats.Runs.@category"="A", "stats.Runs.@abbreviation"="A",
  "stats.Runs.#text"="A", "stats.Hits.@category"="A",
  "stats.Hits.@abbreviation"="A", "stats.Hits.#text"="A", check.names=FALSE)