dplyr::select - Including All Other Columns at End of New Data Frame (or Beginning or Middle)

Question

When interacting with data I find the dplyr library's select() function a great way to organize my data frame columns.

One great use, if I happen to be working with a df that has many columns, I often find myself putting two variables next to each other for easy comparison. When doing this, I then need to attached all other columns either before or after. I found the matches(".") function a super convenient way to do this.

For example:

library(nycflights13) library(dplyr)  # just have the five columns: select(flights, carrier, tailnum, year, month, day)   # new order for all column: select(flights, carrier, tailnum, year, month, day, matches("."))  # matches(".")  attached all other columns to end of new data frame 

The Question - I am curious if there is a better way to do this? Better in the sense of being more flexible.

For example of one issue: Is there some way to include "all other" columns at the beginning or middle of new data.frame? (Note that select(flights, matches("."), year, month, day, ) doesn't produce desired result, since matches(".") attached all columns and year, month, day are ignored because they are repeats of existing columns names.)

Answer 1

Update: using dplyr::relocate()

Selected columns **at the beginning**:

flights %>%     relocate(carrier, tailnum, year, month, day) 

Selected columns **at the end**:

flights %>%     relocate(carrier, tailnum, year, month, day, .after = last_col())  

Old answer

>If you want to **reorder the columns**

All other columns **at the end**:

select(flights, carrier, tailnum, year, month, day, everything())  

Or in two steps, to select variables provided in a character vector, one_of("x", "y", "z"):

col <- c("carrier", "tailnum", "year", "month", "day") select(flights, one_of(col), everything())  

All other columns **at the beginning**:

select(flights, -one_of(col), one_of(col)) 

If you want to add all the data frame again using dplyr:

All data frame at the end:

bind_cols(select(flights, one_of(col)), flights) 

All data frame at the beginning:

bind_cols(flights, select(flights, one_of(col))) 

Answer 2

Though not a very elegant solution, it works.

  select(flights, carrier, tailnum,  one_of(setdiff(colnames(flights),c("carrier","tailnum","year"))),year) 

I used setdiff function to compare. since select do not accept string arguments, I have used one_of function. For list of many utility functions for select argument you can refer to this post.