R Programming

How To Select Multiple Columns Using Grep & R

August 18, 2019 2 Data Science Using R Recent Posts

Why you need to be using Grep when programming with R.

There’s a reason that grep is included in most if not all programming language to this day 44 years later from creation. It’s useful and simple to use. Below is an example of using grep to make selecting multiple columns in R simple and easy to read.

The dataset below has the following column names. 

names(data) # Column Names
 [1] "fips"                 "state"                "county"               "metro_area"          
 [5] "population"           "med_hh_income"        "poverty_rate"         "population_lowaccess"
 [9] "lowincome_lowaccess"  "no_vehicle_lowaccess" "s_grocery"            "s_supermarket"       
[13] "s_convenience"        "s_specialty"          "s_farmers_market"     "r_fastfood"          
[17] "r_full_service"

How can we select only the columns we need to work with?

  • metro_area
  • med_hh_income
  • poverty_rate
  • population_lowaccess
  • lowincome_lowaccess
  • no_vehicle_lowaccess
  • s_grocery
  • s_supermarket
  • s_convenience
  • s_specialty
  • s_farmers_market
  • r_fastfood
  • r_full_service

We can tell R exactly by listing each column as below

data[c("metro_area","med_hh_income", "poverty_rate", "population_lowaccess", "lowincome_lowaccess", "no_vehicle_lowaccess","s_grocery","s_supermarket","s_convenience","s_specialty","s_farmers_market", "r_fastfood", "r_full_service")]

OR

We can tell R where each column we want is.

data[c(4,6,7:17)]

First, writing out each individual column is time consuming and chances are you’re going to make a typo (I did when writing it). Second option we have to first figure out where the columns are located to then tell R. Well looking at the columns we are trying to access vs the others theirs a specific difference. All these columns have a “_” located in there name, and we can use regular expressions (grep) to select these. 

data[grep("_", names(data))])

FYI… to get the column locations you can actually use…

grep("_", names(data))
[1]  4  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

You will rarely have a regular expression as easy at “_” to select multiple columns, a very useful resource to learn and practice is https://regexr.com

Data was obtained from https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/download-the-data/

Creating Excel Workbooks with multiple sheets in R

August 3, 2019 0 Data Science Data Science Using R Recent Posts

Create Excel Workbooks

Generally, when doing anything in R I typically work with .csv files, their fast and straightforward to use. However, I find times, where I need to create a bunch of them to output and having to go and open each one individually, can be a pain for anyone. In this case, it’s much better to create a workbook where each of the .csv files you would have created will now be a separate sheet.



Below is a simple script I use frequently that gets the job done. Also included is the initial process of creating dummy data to outline the process.

EXAMPLE CODE:

Libraries used

library(tidyverse)
library(openxlsx)

Creating example files to work with

products <- c("Monitor", "Laptop", "Keyboards", "Mice")
Stock <- c(20,10,25,50)
Computer_Supplies <- cbind(products,Stock)
products <- c("Packs of Paper", "Staples")
Stock <- c(100,35)
Office_Supplies <- cbind(products,Stock)
# Write the files to our directory
write.csv(Computer_Supplies, "Data/ComputerSupplies.csv", row.names = FALSE)
write.csv(Office_Supplies, "Data/OfficeSupplies.csv", row.names = FALSE)

Point to directory your files are located in (.csv here) and read each in as a list

# Get the file name read in as a column
read_filename <- function(fname) {
  read_csv(fname, col_names = TRUE) %>%
    mutate(filename = fname)
}
tbl <-
  list.files(path = "Data/",
             pattern ="*.csv",
             full.names = TRUE) %>%
  map_df(~read_filename(.))

Removing path from the file names

*Note: Max length of a Workbook’s name is 31 characters

tbl$filename <- gsub("Data/", "", tbl$filename)
tbl$filename <- gsub(".csv", "", tbl$filename)

Split the “tbl” object into individual lists

 mylist <- tbl %>% split(.$filename)
names(mylist)
## [1] "/ComputerSupplies" "/OfficeSupplies"

Creating an Excel workbook and having each CSV file be a separate sheet

wb <- createWorkbook()
lapply(seq_along(mylist), function(i){
  addWorksheet(wb=wb, sheetName = names(mylist[i]))
  writeData(wb, sheet = i, mylist[[i]][-length(mylist[[i]])])
})
#Save Workbook
saveWorkbook(wb, "test.xlsx", overwrite = TRUE

Reading in sheets from an Excel file

(The one we just created)

 df_ComputerSupplies <- read.xlsx("test.xlsx", sheet = 1)

Loading and adding a new sheet to an already existing Excel workbook

wb <- loadWorkbook("test.xlsx")
names(wb)
## [1] "/ComputerSupplies" "/OfficeSupplies"
addWorksheet(wb, "News Sheet Name")
names(wb)
## [1] "/ComputerSupplies" "/OfficeSupplies" "News Sheet Name"