How can I get a dataframe with columns temporarily removed by name?

Question

For example, with the data set mtcars

mtcars[ , \"cyl\"]

and

mtcars[ , 2]

both give me the

Answer 1

I often use subset. An example using mtcars

> names(mtcars)
 [1] "mpg"  "cyl"  "disp" "hp"   "drat" "wt"   "qsec" "vs"   "am"   "gear" "carb"
> cars <- subset(mtcars, select=-c(mpg,cyl))
> names(cars)
[1] "disp" "hp"   "drat" "wt"   "qsec" "vs"   "am"   "gear" "carb"

There are some other ideas in the answers to this question.

Update: Subset also works for temporary removal of one or more columns by name, just replace mtcars[,-2] with subset(mtcars, select=-cyl).