How to find the column number of a string column based on a string match in an R data frame?

A data frame might be very long and contain columns with only string values as well as numerical values. While doing the analysis, we might want to check which columns contain a particular string value. For example, if we have a column with string values as A, B, and C and we want to check which column contains a value “A” then apply function can be used as shown in the below examples.

Example

Consider the below data frame −

 Live Demo

x1<-sample(LETTERS[1:4],20,replace=TRUE) x2<-rpois(20,2) df1<-data.frame(x1,x2) df1

Output

  x1 x2 1  A 3 2  B 1 3  B 2 4  A 2 5  D 3 6  C 2 7  A 3 8  B 1 9  D 3 10 A 1 11 B 0 12 A 2 13 D 2 14 B 0 15 B 3 16 B 1 17 D 4 18 C 1 19 B 4 20 B 1

Checking the column where A exists -

Example

sapply(df1, function(x) any(x=="A"))

Output

 x1    x2 TRUE FALSE

Here, the output for column x1 is TRUE, thus the column x1 contains A.

Example

 Live Demo

y1<-rnorm(20) y2<-sample(c("Rooh","Frank","Christina"),20,replace=TRUE) df2<-data.frame(y1,y2) df2

Output

      y1       y2 1 -1.05746268 Christina 2 -0.46353464 Rooh 3 -0.30686060 Rooh 4 0.22968835 Christina 5 0.36001582 Rooh 6 0.21773469 Christina 7 0.52068600 Christina 8 -0.28930238 Christina 9 2.75670872 Rooh 10 -0.70136439 Frank 11 1.49660551 Frank 12 0.02635582 Rooh 13 -2.20396449 Frank 14 0.82857546 Frank 15 0.36148329 Rooh 16 -0.82422499 Frank 17 -0.50081026 Rooh 18 -0.07842975 Christina 19 -1.19349053 Rooh 20 -0.55590686 Frank

Checking the column where Rooh exists -

Example

sapply(df2, function(x) any(x=="Rooh"))

Output

  y1   y2 FALSE TRUE