How do I split a data frame based on range of column values in R?

Question

I have a data set like this:

Users   Age
1        2
2        7
3        10
4        3
5        8
6        20

How do I split this data set i

Answer 1

You can combine split with cut to do this in a single line of code, avoiding the need to subset with a bunch of different expressions for different data ranges:

split(dat, cut(dat$Age, c(0, 5, 10, 15), include.lowest=TRUE))
# $`[0,5]`
#   Users Age
# 1     1   2
# 4     4   3
# 
# $`(5,10]`
#   Users Age
# 2     2   7
# 3     3  10
# 5     5   8
# 
# $`(10,15]`
# [1] Users Age  
# <0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

cut splits up data based on the specified break points, and split splits up a data frame based on the provided categories. If you stored the result of this computation into a list called l, you could access the smaller data frames with l[[1]], l[[2]], and l[[3]] or the more verbose:

l$`[0,5]`
l$`(5,10]`
l$`(10, 15]`