r - pair-wise duplicate removal from dataframe

Question

This question already has an answer here:

Answer 1

Extending Ari's answer, to specify columns to check if other columns are also there:

a <- c(rep("A", 3), rep("B", 3), rep("C",2))
b <- c('A','B','B','C','A','A','B','B')
df <-data.frame(a,b)

df$c = sample(1:10,8)
df$d = sample(LETTERS,8)
df
  a b  c d
1 A A 10 B
2 A B  8 S
3 A B  7 J
4 B C  3 Q
5 B A  2 I
6 B A  6 U
7 C B  4 L
8 C B  5 V

cols = c(1,2)
newdf = df[,cols]
for (i in 1:nrow(df)){
    newdf[i, ] = sort(df[i,cols])
}

df[!duplicated(newdf),]
  a b c d
1 A A 8 X
2 A B 7 L
4 B C 2 P