r - Difference between pull and select in dplyr?

Question

It seems like dplyr::pull() and dplyr::select() do the same thing. Is there a difference besides that dplyr::pull() only selects 1 variable?

Answer 1

First, it makes to see what class each function creates.

library(dplyr)

mtcars %>% pull(cyl) %>% class()
#> 'numeric'

mtcars %>% select(cyl) %>% class()
#> 'data.frame'

So pull() creates a vector -- which, in this case, is numeric -- whereas select() creates a data frame.

Basically, pull() is the equivalent to writing mtcars$cyl or mtcars[, "cyl"], whereas select() removes all of the columns except for cyl but maintains the data frame structure