Rearrange Variables in a Data Frame in R

Question

If I have variables in a data frame in the following order

date var1 var2 var3

is there a way to rearrange the variables so that visually when I see the data using the View(data) or fix(data) command, I can see them rearranged in the following

date var2 var3 var1

See also [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12544888/is-there-an-equivalent-r-function-to-stata-order-command). — A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1, Dec 09 '13 at 10:24

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 08 '13 at 23:18

2

If you have a data.frame named df with names(df) as c('date', 'V1', 'V2', 'V3'), you can reorder it to c('date', 'V2', 'V3', 'V1') using this:

df <- df[,c(1,3,4,2)]

answered Dec 08 '13 at 23:18

JBecker

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 09 '13 at 08:44

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I think in your example I would probably go with @JBecker's answer, but I'd like to bring to your attention 'DataCombine' , a nice little package with all sorts of tools regarding data cleaning, combining etc. The function 'MoveFront' would do what you want.

require(DataCombine)
# using 'OldOrder' as the name of the original df
NewOrder <- MoveFront(OldOrder, c('date', 'V2', 'V3'))`

answered Dec 09 '13 at 08:44

hvollmeier

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You may also check out [my post here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12544888/is-there-an-equivalent-r-function-to-stata-order-command) or [at my blog](http://news.mrdwab.com/2013/08/28/an-r-function-like-order-from-stata/) where I introduce a function called "`moveme`" that works nicely to help rearrange columns in a `data.frame`. – A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1 Dec 09 '13 at 10:25

Rearrange Variables in a Data Frame in R

2 Answers2