Remove First Row of Data Frame in R (Example)

In this article you’ll learn how to delete the first row of a data set in the R programming language.

The tutorial will contain the following content:

It’s time to dive into the example.

Introducing Example Data

Consider the exemplifying data below:

data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:5,    # Creating example data
                   x2 = LETTERS[1:5])
data                            # Printing example data
#   x1 x2
# 1  1  A
# 2  2  B
# 3  3  C
# 4  4  D
# 5  5  E

As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, our exemplifying data is a data frame with two columns and five rows.

Example: Delete First Row of Data Frame

This Example shows how to remove the top row of a data frame in the R programming language. For this task, we have to subset our data so that the row at index position 1 is removed. We can do that by specifying – 1 within square brackets as shown below:

data_new <- data[- 1, ]         # Remove first row
data_new                        # Print updated data
#   x1 x2
# 2  2  B
# 3  3  C
# 4  4  D
# 5  5  E

Have a look at the previous output: It’s showing the same data as before except the first row.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you need more explanations on the topics of this tutorial? Then you may want to have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I explain the R programming code of this tutorial.

Additionally, you might have a look at the other articles which I have published on my website. You can find some other articles here.

• Conditionally Remove Row from Data Frame in R
• Remove Duplicated Rows from Data Frame in R
• Extract Subset of Data Frame Rows Containing NA in R
• The R Programming Language

To summarize: In this tutorial, I illustrated how to remove the top row of a data frame in R programming. In case you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments. Furthermore, don’t forget to subscribe to my email newsletter for updates on the newest articles.