removing a list of columns from a data.frame using subset [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can certainly use select, but you've got to pass in names, not characters. So this will work:

subset( mtcars, select = -c(hp, drat, wt, qsec) )

Answer 2

I would probably do this like so:

to.remove <- c("hp","drat","wt","qsec")
`%ni%` <- Negate(`%in%`)
subset(mtcars,select = names(mtcars) %ni% to.remove)

(I use %ni% a lot, so I have it built into my .Rprofile already.)