R Recipe: Reordering Columns in a Flexible Way

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Suppose you have a data frame with a number of columns.

> names(trading)
 [1] "OpenDate"   "CloseDate"  "Symbol"     "Action"     "Lots"       "SL"         "TP"         "OpenPrice" 
 [9] "ClosePrice" "Commission" "Swap"       "Pips"       "Profit"     "Gain"       "Duration"   "Trader"    
[17] "System"

You want to put the Trader and System columns first but you also want to do this in a flexible way. One approach would be to specify column numbers.

> trading = trading[, c(16:17, 1:15)]
> names(trading)
 [1] "Trader"     "System"     "OpenDate"   "CloseDate"  "Symbol"     "Action"     "Lots"       "SL"        
 [9] "TP"         "OpenPrice"  "ClosePrice" "Commission" "Swap"       "Pips"       "Profit"     "Gain"      
[17] "Duration"

This does the job but it’s not very flexible. After all, the number of columns might change. Rather do it by specifying column names.

> refcols <- c("Trader", "System")
> #
> trading <- trading[, c(refcols, setdiff(names(trading), refcols))]
> names(trading)
 [1] "Trader"     "System"     "OpenDate"   "CloseDate"  "Symbol"     "Action"     "Lots"       "SL"        
 [9] "TP"         "OpenPrice"  "ClosePrice" "Commission" "Swap"       "Pips"       "Profit"     "Gain"      
[17] "Duration"

The post R Recipe: Reordering Columns in a Flexible Way appeared first on Exegetic Analytics.

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