Dynamically select data frame columns using $ and a character value

Question

You can't do that kind of subsetting with $. In the source code (R/src/main/subset.c) it states:

/*The $ subset operator.
We need to be sure to only evaluate the first argument.
The second will be a symbol that needs to be matched, not evaluated.
*/

Second argument? What?! You have to realise that $, like everything else in R, (including for instance ( , + , ^ etc) is a function, that takes arguments and is evaluated. df$V1 could be rewritten as

`$`(df , V1)

or indeed

`$`(df , "V1")

But...

`$`(df , paste0("V1") )

...for instance will never work, nor will anything else that must first be evaluated in the second argument. You may only pass a string which is never evaluated.

Instead use [ (or [[ if you want to extract only a single column as a vector).

For example,

var <- "mpg"
#Doesn't work
mtcars$var
#These both work, but note that what they return is different
# the first is a vector, the second is a data.frame
mtcars[[var]]
mtcars[var]

You can perform the ordering without loops, using do.call to construct the call to order. Here is a reproducible example below:

#  set seed for reproducibility
set.seed(123)
df <- data.frame( col1 = sample(5,10,repl=T) , col2 = sample(5,10,repl=T) , col3 = sample(5,10,repl=T) )

#  We want to sort by 'col3' then by 'col1'
sort_list <- c("col3","col1")

#  Use 'do.call' to call order. Seccond argument in do.call is a list of arguments
#  to pass to the first argument, in this case 'order'.
#  Since  a data.frame is really a list, we just subset the data.frame
#  according to the columns we want to sort in, in that order
df[ do.call( order , df[ , match( sort_list , names(df) ) ]  ) , ]

   col1 col2 col3
10    3    5    1
9     3    2    2
7     3    2    3
8     5    1    3
6     1    5    4
3     3    4    4
2     4    3    4
5     5    1    4
1     2    5    5
4     5    3    5

Using dplyr provides an easy syntax for sorting the data frames

library(dplyr)
mtcars %>% arrange(gear, desc(mpg))

It might be useful to use the NSE version as shown here to allow dynamically building the sort list

sort_list <- c("gear", "desc(mpg)")
mtcars %>% arrange_(.dots = sort_list)

If I understand correctly, you have a vector containing variable names and would like loop through each name and sort your data frame by them. If so, this example should illustrate a solution for you. The primary issue in yours (the full example isn't complete so I"m not sure what else you may be missing) is that it should be order(Q1_R1000[,parameter[X]]) instead of order(Q1_R1000$parameter[X]), since parameter is an external object that contains a variable name opposed to a direct column of your data frame (which when the $ would be appropriate).

set.seed(1)
dat <- data.frame(var1=round(rnorm(10)),
                   var2=round(rnorm(10)),
                   var3=round(rnorm(10)))
param <- paste0("var",1:3)
dat
#   var1 var2 var3
#1    -1    2    1
#2     0    0    1
#3    -1   -1    0
#4     2   -2   -2
#5     0    1    1
#6    -1    0    0
#7     0    0    0
#8     1    1   -1
#9     1    1    0
#10    0    1    0

for(p in rev(param)){
   dat <- dat[order(dat[,p]),]
 }
dat
#   var1 var2 var3
#3    -1   -1    0
#6    -1    0    0
#1    -1    2    1
#7     0    0    0
#2     0    0    1
#10    0    1    0
#5     0    1    1
#8     1    1   -1
#9     1    1    0
#4     2   -2   -2

Another solution is to use #get:

> cols <- c("cyl", "am")
> get(cols[1], mtcars)
 [1] 6 6 4 6 8 6 8 4 4 6 6 8 8 8 8 8 8 4 4 4 4 8 8 8 8 4 4 4 8 6 8 4