Extract a dplyr tbl column as a vector

Question

Is there a more succinct way to get one column of a dplyr tbl as a vector, from a tbl with database back-end (i.e. the data frame/table can\'t be subset directly)?

Answer 1

If you are used to using square brackets for indexing, another option is to just to wrap the usual indexing approach in a call to deframe(), e.g.:

library(tidyverse)

iris2 <- as_tibble(iris)

# using column name
deframe(iris2[, 'Sepal.Length'])

# [1] 5.1 4.9 4.7 4.6 5.0 5.4

# using column number
deframe(iris2[, 1])

# [1] 5.1 4.9 4.7 4.6 5.0 5.4

That and pull() are both pretty good ways of getting a tibble column.