Is there a way to select every column from one column to another with brackets in R?

Question

I know in subset() you can pull every column starting with one and ending with another pretty easily.

df <- as.data.frame(state.x77)
subset(df, Frost > 30, select=Illiteracy:Murder)

I know with brackets you can do something like df[df$Frost > 30, 3:5]

Is there a way to recreate the subset statement with brackets that uses the column names?

Answer 1

You will find

df <- state.x77
df[df[, "Frost"] > 150, c("Illiteracy", "Life Exp", "Murder")]

produces

              Illiteracy Life Exp Murder
Alaska               1.5    69.31   11.3
Colorado             0.7    72.06    6.8
Maine                0.7    70.39    2.7
Minnesota            0.6    72.96    2.3
Montana              0.6    70.56    5.0
Nevada               0.5    69.03   11.5
New Hampshire        0.7    71.23    3.3
North Dakota         0.8    72.78    1.4
South Dakota         0.5    72.08    1.7
Vermont              0.6    71.64    5.5
Wyoming              0.6    70.29    6.9

Incidentally, state.x77 is a matrix, not a dataframe. As a matrix you could use

df <- state.x77
df[df[, "Frost"] > 150, which(colnames(df)=="Illiteracy"):which(colnames(df)=="Murder")]

or as a dataframe

df <- as.data.frame(state.x77)
df[df[, "Frost"] > 150, which(names(df) == "Illiteracy"):which(names(df) == "Murder")]

to produce the same result, and you could write a function to make this prettier

Answer 2

Another approach with dplyr

library(dplyr)
df = as.data.frame(state.x77)
df %>% filter(Frost > 30) %>% select(Illiteracy:Murder) %>% head()

  Illiteracy Life Exp Murder
1        1.5    69.31   11.3
2        1.9    70.66   10.1
3        0.7    72.06    6.8
4        1.1    72.48    3.1
5        0.9    70.06    6.2
6        2.0    68.54   13.9