Add (insert) a column between two columns in a data.frame

Question

I have a data frame that has columns a, b, and c. I\'d like to add a new column d between b and c.

I know I could just add d at the end by using cbind but h

Answer 1

Presuming that c always immediately follows b, this code will add a column after b no matter where b is in your data.frame.

> test <- data.frame(a=1,b=1,c=1)
> test
  a b c
1 1 1 1

> bspot <- which(names(test)=="b")

> data.frame(test[1:bspot],d=2,test[(bspot+1):ncol(test)])
  a b d c
1 1 1 2 1

Or possibly more naturally:

data.frame(append(test, list(d=2), after=match("b", names(test))))