Set a Data Frame Column as the Index of R data.frame object

Question

Using R, how do I make a column of a dataframe the dataframe\'s index? Lets assume I read in my data from a .csv file. One of the columns is called \'Date\' and I want to ma

Answer 1

The tidyverse solution:

library(tidyverse)
df %>% column_to_rownames(., var = "Date")

Answer 2

I assume that by "Index" you mean row names. You can assign to the row names vector:

rownames(df) <- df$Date

Answer 3

The index can be set while reading the data, in both pandas and R.

In pandas:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('/mydata.csv', index_col="Date")

In R:

df <- read.csv("/mydata.csv", header=TRUE, row.names="Date")