How to access single elements in a table in R

Question

How do I grab elements from a table in R.

My Data looks like this:

         V1     V2
1      12.448 13.919
2      22.242  4.606
3           


        

Answer 1

Maybe not so perfect as above ones, but I guess this is what you were looking for.

data[1:1,3:3]    #works with positive integers
data[1:1, -3:-3] #does not work, gives the entire 1st row without the 3rd element
data[i:i,j:j]    #given that i and j are positive integers

Here indexing will work from 1, i.e,

data[1:1,1:1]    #means the top-leftmost element

Answer 2

That is so basic that I am wondering what book you are using to study? Try

data[1, "V1"]  # row first, quoted column name second, and case does matter

Further note: Terminology in discussing R can be crucial and sometimes tricky. Using the term "table" to refer to that structure leaves open the possibility that it was either a 'table'-classed, or a 'matrix'-classed, or a 'data.frame'-classed object. The answer above would succeed with any of them, while @BenBolker's suggestion below would only succeed with a 'data.frame'-classed object.

I am unrepentant in my phrasing despite the recent downvote. There is a ton of free introductory material for beginners in R: https://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html

Answer 3

?"[" pretty much covers the various ways of accessing elements of things.

Under usage it lists these:

x[i]
x[i, j, ... , drop = TRUE]
x[[i, exact = TRUE]]
x[[i, j, ..., exact = TRUE]]
x$name
getElement(object, name)

x[i] <- value
x[i, j, ...] <- value
x[[i]] <- value
x$i <- value

The second item is sufficient for your purpose

Under Arguments it points out that with [ the arguments i and j can be numeric, character or logical

So these work:

data[1,1]
data[1,"V1"]

As does this:

data$V1[1]

and keeping in mind a data frame is a list of vectors:

data[[1]][1]
data[["V1"]][1]

will also both work.

So that's a few things to be going on with. I suggest you type in the examples at the bottom of the help page one line at a time (yes, actually type the whole thing in one line at a time and see what they all do, you'll pick up stuff very quickly and the typing rather than copypasting is an important part of helping to commit it to memory.)