Q:

extract columns that don't have a header or name in R

I need to extract the columns from a dataset without header names.
I have a ~10000 x 3 data set and I need to plot the first column against the second two.
I know how to do it when the columns have names ~ plot(data$V1, data$V2) but in this case they do not. How do I access each column individually when they do not have names?
Thanks

A:

I usually select columns by their position in the matrix/data frame.
e.g.
dataset[,4] to select the 4th column.
The 1st number in brackets refers to rows, the second to columns. Here, I didn't use a "1st number" so all rows of column 4 are selected, i.e., the whole column.
This is easy to remember since it stems from matrix calculations. E.g., a 4x3 dimensional matrix has 4 rows and 3 columns. Thus when I want to select the 1st row of the third column, I could do something like matrix[1,3]

A:

Why not give them sensible names?
names(data)=c("This","That","Other")
plot(data$This,data$That)

That's a better solution than using the column number, since names are meaningful and if your data changes to have a different number of columns your code may break in several places. Give your data the correct names and as long as you always refer to data$This then your code will work.

