In this tutorial, we will look at how to convert a column in an R dataframe to a vector with the help of some examples.
How do you get column values as a vector in R?

You can use the [[]]
notation to get an R dataframe’s column values as a vector using the column name or the column index.
The following is the syntax –
dataframe[[columan_name]]
We get the column values as a vector.
Steps to convert R dataframe column to a vector
Let’s now look at the steps to follow to get a column’s values as a vector in an R dataframe.
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Step 1 – Create a dataframe
First, we will create a dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial.
# create a dataframe employees_df = data.frame( "Name"= c("Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi", "Kevin"), "Age"= c(26, 28, 29, 32, 30), "Department"= c("Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR", "Accounting") ) # display the dataframe print(employees_df)
Output:
Name Age Department 1 Jim 26 Sales 2 Dwight 28 Sales 3 Angela 29 Accounting 4 Tobi 32 HR 5 Kevin 30 Accounting
We now have a dataframe containing information about some employees working in an office. The dataframe has columns “Name”, “Age”, and “Department”.
Note that we use vectors here as column values to create a dataframe. You can think of a dataframe as vertical column vectors stacked side-by-side to form a tabular structure.
Step 2 – Get column value as a vector using [[]]
notation
The values in a column are represented by a vector. Thus to get the vector of values for a column, we just need to access the column values which we can do using the [[]]
notation.
Let’s now get the values in the “Name” column as a vector. For this, we’ll access the column values using the column name “Name”.
# get column "Name" values names <- employees_df[["Name"]] # display the vector print(names)
Output:
[1] "Jim" "Dwight" "Angela" "Tobi" "Kevin"
We get a vector of values from the “Name” column.
Note that you can also use the column index to access a column’s values. For example, in the above dataframe, the index of the “Name” column is 1 (rows and columns in R are indexed starting from 1).
# get column "Name" values names <- employees_df[[1]] # display the vector print(names)
Output:
[1] "Jim" "Dwight" "Angela" "Tobi" "Kevin"
We get the same result as above.
You might also be interested in –
- Create a DataFrame in R
- How to Add a Row to a Dataframe in R?
- How to Add a Column to a Dataframe in R?
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