How to Remove Rows in R

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To understand a detailed analysis of the dataset, sometimes, we want to remove specific rows and clear the data to analyze more efficiently. This is where subsetting is essential and, in other words deleting specific rows.

How to remove rows in R

To remove the rows in R, use the subsetting in R. There is no built-in function of removing a row from the data frame, but you can access a data frame without some rows specified by the negative index. This process is also called subsetting. This way, you can remove unwanted rows from the data frame.

Syntax of subsetting

df[-c(row_index_1, row_index_2),]

Parameters

The df is the data frame.

The row_index_1, row_index_2, . . . are the comma-separated indices that should be removed in the resulting data frame.

It takes a vector of row indexes that needs to be removed. You can pass a single value to remove the single row or multiple elements vector to remove multiple rows.

Example

Let’s define a data frame.

df <- data.frame(
 Shares = c("TCS", "Reliance", "HDFC Bank", "HUL"),
 Price = c(3200, 1900, 1500, 2200)
)

df

Output

   Shares      Price
1   TCS        3200
2   Reliance   1900
3   HDFC Bank  1500
4   HUL        2200

Let’s remove the third row from the data frame. To remove the third row, you need to follow the below snippet.

dfRemain <- df[-c(3), ]

We passed a negative index 3 means third row. It will subset the data frame and returns the data frame without a third row. See the entire code below.

df <- data.frame(
 Shares = c("TCS", "Reliance", "HDFC Bank", "HUL"),
 Price = c(3200, 1900, 1500, 2200)
)
dfRemain <- df[-c(3), ]
dfRemain

Output

  Shares    Price
1  TCS      3200
2  Reliance 1900
4  HUL      2200

You can see that we got the data frame without a third row.

Deleting multiple rows in R

To remove the multiple rows in R, use the subsetting and pass the vector with multiple elements. The elements are the row index, which we need to remove.

To remove the second and third-row in R, use -c(2, 3), and it will return the data frame without the second and third row.

df <- data.frame(
 Shares = c("TCS", "Reliance", "HDFC Bank", "HUL"),
 Price = c(3200, 1900, 1500, 2200)
)
dfRemain <- df[-c(2, 3),]
dfRemain

Output

   Shares   Price
1   TCS     3200
4   HUL     2200

You can see that two rows have been removed from the data frame, and the indices of the removed rows are (2, 3).

df <- data.frame(
 Shares = c("TCS", "Reliance", "HDFC Bank", "HUL"),
 Price = c(3200, 1900, 1500, 2200)
)
dfRemain <- df[c(TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE), ]
dfRemain

Output

  Shares  Price
1  TCS    3200
4  HUL    2200

That is it for this tutorial.

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