Extracting numeric columns from a data frame - R

Question

I am working with the iris data-set and want to extract only the numeric columns from it:

      Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2     setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2     setosa
3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2     setosa
4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2     setosa
5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2     setosa
6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4     setosa

For this data-set and in general if i wanted to extract only the numeric columns, how can i do it?

Answer 1

You can use the select_if() function from the dplyr package for this purpose:

iris %>% select_if(is.numeric)->iris_1

The above code will solve your problem:

head(iris_1)

       Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2
3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2
4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2
5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2
6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4

Comments

select_if(iris,is.numeric)

Exactly worked!. Thanks