Extract Single Element from Data Frame in R (2 Examples)

In this tutorial, I’ll show how to access a particular element of a data frame in R.

The content of the article is structured as follows:

So without further ado, let’s do this:

Construction of Example Data

We’ll use the following data as basement for this R programming tutorial:

data <- data.frame(x1 = 1:5,    # Creating example data frame
                   x2 = letters[1:5])
data                            # Printing entire example data frame

The previous table shows that our example data consists of five rows and two columns.

Example 1: Return Single Element Based On Row Index & Variable Name

In Example 1, I’ll explain how to return only one element from a data matrix using row indices and variable names.

Consider the following R code:

data[3, "x2"]                   # Extract element
# [1] "c"

The RStudio console returns the value “c”, i.e. the third element of the variable x2.

Example 2: Return Single Element Based On Row Index & Column Index

In Example 2, I’ll illustrate how to use row and column indices to access a specific element of a data table.

Have a look at the following code:

data[3, 2]                      # Extract element
# [1] "c"

The output is the same as in Example 1. However, this time we have used the column index instead of the variable name.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

I have recently published a video on my YouTube channel, which illustrates the topics of this tutorial. You can find the video below.

In addition, you might read the related articles on my website:

• Extract Subset of Data Frame Rows Containing NA
• Extract Certain Columns of Data Frame
• Extract Row from Data Frame
• Extract Every nth Element of a Vector
• The R Programming Language

In this tutorial, I have illustrated how to return a certain data frame element in R programming. Please let me know in the comments section, if you have any further comments or questions.