Subsetting in R using OR condition with strings

Question

I have a data frame with about 40 columns, the second column, data[2] contains the name of the company that the rest of the row data describes. However, the names of the compani

Answer 1

First of all (as Jonathan done in his comment) to reference second column you should use either data[[2]] or data[,2]. But if you are using subset you could use column name: subset(data, CompanyName == ...).

And for you question I will do one of:

subset(data, data[[2]] %in% c("Company Name 09", "Company Name"), drop = TRUE) 
subset(data, grepl("^Company Name", data[[2]]), drop = TRUE)

In second I use grepl (introduced with R version 2.9) which return logical vector with TRUE for match.