r - Reordering columns in a large dataframe

Question

Using the following example dataframe:

a <-  c(1:5)
b <- c("Cat", "Dog", "Rabbit", "Cat", "Dog")
c <- c("Dog", "Rabbit", "Cat", "Dog", "Dog")
d <- c("Rabbit", "Cat", "Dog", "Dog", "Rabbit")
e <- c("Cat", "Dog", "Dog", "Rabbit", "Cat")
f <- c("Cat", "Dog", "Dog", "Rabbit", "Cat")

df <- data.frame(a,b,c,d,e,f)

I want to investigate how to reorder the columns WITHOUT having to type in all the column names, i.e., df[,c("a","d","e","f","b","c")]

How would I just say I want columns b and c AFTER column f? (only referencing the columns or range of columns that I want to move?).

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

To move specific columns to the beginning or end of a data.frame, use select from the dplyr package and its everything() function. In this example we are sending to the end:

library(dplyr)
df %>%
  select(-b, -c, everything())

  a      d      e      f      b      c
1 1 Rabbit    Cat    Cat    Cat    Dog
2 2    Cat    Dog    Dog    Dog Rabbit
3 3    Dog    Dog    Dog Rabbit    Cat
4 4    Dog Rabbit Rabbit    Cat    Dog
5 5 Rabbit    Cat    Cat    Dog    Dog

Without the negation, the columns would be sent to the front.