Remove columns based on row names

Question

I have 2 data frames and I would like to remove all columns in df1 that names match row names in df2.

df1

  GO_267 GO_345 GO_5 GO_2
a  0      1     1    1
b  0      1     1    1
c  0      1     1    1
d  0      1     1    1
e  0      1     1    1

df2

       z
GO_267 2
GO_345 3
GO_2   7

Answer 1

You may using which to subset, using the list of row names from the second data frame as the source of column names to exclude.

df1[ , -which(names(df1) %in% row.names(df2)), drop=FALSE]
  GO_5
1    1
2    1
3    1
4    1
5    1

Data:

df1 <- data.frame(GO_267=c(0,0,0,0,0), GO_345=c(1,1,1,1,1), GO_5=c(1,1,1,1,1),
                  GO_2=c(1,1,1,1,1))
df2 <- data.frame(z=c(2,3,7))
row.names(df2) <- c("GO_267", "GO_345", "GO_2")

Answer 2

We could use setdiff :

df1[setdiff(names(df1), rownames(df2))]

#  GO_5
#a    1
#b    1
#c    1
#d    1
#e    1

Answer 3

We can use select

library(dplyr)
df1 %>%
    select(-row.names(df2))

data

df1 <- data.frame(GO_267=c(0,0,0,0,0), GO_345=c(1,1,1,1,1), GO_5=c(1,1,1,1,1),
                  GO_2=c(1,1,1,1,1))
df2 <- data.frame(z=c(2,3,7))
row.names(df2) <- c("GO_267", "GO_345", "GO_2")