Create Duplicate of Column in R (2 Examples)

In this article you’ll learn how to replicate a column in a data frame in the R programming language.

The article is structured as follows:

It’s time to dive into the examples…

Exemplifying Data

We’ll use the following data frame as basement for this R tutorial.

data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:6,    # Create example data
                   x2 = letters[1:6])
data                            # Print example data

As you can see based on Table 1, our example data is a data frame containing six rows and two columns that are named “x1” and “x2”. The column x1 is an integer and the column x2 has the character class.

Example 1: Create Duplicate of Column Using Base R

The following R code illustrates how to replicate a data frame variable in a data frame with a new name.

Have a look at the following R code and its output:

data_new1 <- data               # Duplicate entire data frame
data_new1$x3 <- data_new1$x1    # Create duplicate of column with new name
data_new1                       # Print new data frame

As shown in Table 2, we have created a new data frame called data_new1, which contains a duplicate of the column x1. This duplicate has been called x3.

Example 2: Create Duplicate of Column Using mutate() Function of dplyr Package

In this example, I’ll explain how to use the functions of the dplyr package to construct a duplicated and renamed variable in a data frame.

We first need to install and load the dplyr package:

install.packages("dplyr")       # Install & load dplyr package
library("dplyr")

Next, we can apply the mutate function to create a replication of the variable x1 as follows:

data_new2 <- data %>%           # Create duplicate of column with new name
  mutate(x3 = x1)
data_new2                       # Print new data frame

Table 3 shows the output of the previous syntax – Another data matrix containing the same values as in Example 1. However, this time we have used the dplyr package instead of Base R.

Video & Further Resources

Have a look at the following video on my YouTube channel. In the video, I illustrate the R programming codes of this tutorial.

In addition, you might want to read the other articles on https://www.statisticsglobe.com/.

• Remove Columns with Duplicate Names from Data Frame
• Delete Duplicate Rows Based On Column Values
• Sum Duplicate Rows in R
• Create Data Frame where a Column is a List
• Create Data Frame with Spaces in Column Names
• R Programming Overview

This post has illustrated how to duplicate a variable in a data frame in the R programming language. In case you have further questions or comments, let me know in the comments section.