Give fixed order for columns based on column names for different dfs

Question

I have multiple dataframes that all contain one or more of the columns dogs, cats, birds or fish. For all the dataframes I would like to have the order fish, cats, dogs, birds for the columns.

df <- data.frame(dogs = c(1:2), cats = c(33:34), birds = c(2:3), fish = c(7:8))
  dogs cats birds fish
1    1   33     2    7
2    2   34     3    8

df2 <- data.frame(dogs = c(5:6), cats = c(103:104), birds = c(4:5))
  dogs cats birds
1    5  103     4
2    6  104     5

I would like to get

#order fish, cats, dogs, birds
df
  fish cats dogs birds
1    7   33    1     2
2    8   34    2     3

df2
  cats dogs birds
1  103    5     4
2  104    6     5

Right now I'm changing the column order for all dataframes manually (df[,c(4,2,1,3)] etc) and can't seem to find a way to solve this otherwise. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

One dplyr option could be:

df %>%
 select(any_of(c("fish", "cats", "dogs", "birds")))

  fish cats dogs birds
1    7   33    1     2
2    8   34    2     3

df2 %>%
 select(any_of(c("fish", "cats", "dogs", "birds")))

  cats dogs birds
1  103    5     4
2  104    6     5

If you have many of such datasets, then with the addition of purrr, you can do:

map(.x = list(df, df2),
    ~ .x %>%
     select(any_of(c("fish", "cats", "dogs", "birds"))))

[[1]]
  fish cats dogs birds
1    7   33    1     2
2    8   34    2     3

[[2]]
  cats dogs birds
1  103    5     4
2  104    6     5