Strange behaviour dropping column from data.frame in R

Question

I\'ve encountered a strange behavior when dropping columns from data.frame. Initially I have:

> a <- data.frame(\"a\" = c(1,2,3), \"abc\" = c(3,2,1));          


        

Answer 1

While your exact question has already been answered in the comments, an alternative to avoid this behaviour is to convert your data.frame to a tibble, which is a stripped downed version of a data.frame, without column name munging, among other things:

library(tibble)
df_t <- as_data_frame(a)
df_t
# A tibble: 3 × 1
    abc
  
1     3
2     2
3     1
> df_t$a
NULL
Warning message:
Unknown column 'a'