Extract Row from Data Frame in R (2 Examples)

In this tutorial, I’ll illustrate how to return a certain row of a data frame in the R programming language.

The article looks as follows:

• Construction of Example Data
• Example 1: Get One Specific Row of Data Frame
• Example 2: Return Multiple Rows of Data Frame
• Video & Further Resources

Let’s start right away…

Construction of Example Data

We’ll use the following R data frame as example data for the following example.

data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:4,         # Create example data
                   x2 = 2:5,
                   x3 = 9)
data                                 # Print example data
#   x1 x2 x3
# 1  1  2  9
# 2  2  3  9
# 3  3  4  9
# 4  4  5  9

As you can see based on the output of the RStudio console, our data consists of four rows and three numeric columns.

Example 1: Get One Specific Row of Data Frame

In case we want to extract a specific row of our example data, we can specify within square brackets the row index of the row we want to return. Consider the following R programming syntax:

data[2, ]                            # Extract row of data
#   x1 x2 x3
# 2  2  3  9

As you can see, the RStudio console returned the second row of our data frame.

Note that we had to specify the index of our row in front of a comma, in order to tell the R programming language that we want to extract a row. If we would specify the number 2 after the comma, we would extract a variable instead of a row.

Example 2: Return Multiple Rows of Data Frame

We can also extract multiple rows from a data frame in R. We simply need to specify a vector instead of a single value within the square brackets:

data[c(1, 4), ]                      # Get multiple rows
#   x1 x2 x3
# 1  1  2  9
# 4  4  5  9

In this example, we returned the first and the fourth row of our data.

Video & Further Resources

Do you need further info on the R syntax of this tutorial? Then you might have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I’m illustrating the examples of this article in RStudio:

In addition, you might read the other articles of my homepage:

• Subset Data Frame Rows by Logical Condition in R
• Sample Random Rows of Data Frame
• Extract Certain Columns of Data Frame
• R Functions List (+ Examples)
• The R Programming Language

At this point you should have learned how to access or subset a row with a particular index in a data matrix in R programming. If you have further questions, tell me about it in the comments below.