Selecting top N rows for each group based on value in column

Question

I have dataframe like below :-

x<-c(3,2,1,8,7,11,10,9,7,5,4)
y<-c(\"a\",\"a\",\"a\", \"b\",\"b\",\"c\",\"c\",\"c\",\"c\",\"c\",\"c\")
z<-c(2,2,2,1,1         


        

Answer 1

A solution with base R:

# df is split according to y, then we keep only the top "z" value (after ordering x) 
# and rbind everything back together:
do.call(rbind, 
        lapply(split(df, df$y), 
               function(df1) df1[order(df1$x, decreasing=TRUE), ][1:unique(df1$z), ]))
#     x y z
#a.1  3 a 2
#a.2  2 a 2
#b    8 b 1
#c.6 11 c 3
#c.7 10 c 3
#c.8  9 c 3

EDIT:
A much more direct way (still in base R) provided in comment by @mt1022:

df[ave(1:nrow(df), df$y, FUN = seq_along) <= df$z, ]
#   x y z
#1  3 a 2
#2  2 a 2
#4  8 b 1
#6 11 c 3
#7 10 c 3
#8  9 c 3