Removing row names of a dataframe seems trivial but sometimes it is desired. To see how it works, consider the mtcars example:
d1 <- mtcars
head(d1)
## mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
## Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4
## Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4
## Datsun 710 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1
## Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1
## Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2
## Valiant 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
You can notice that row names are different from the rest of data in that there’s no column name on top. We can simply assign NULL to it, indicating that it’s undefined.
# Assign NULL value to row ranems
row.names(d1) <- NULL
head(d1)
## mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
## 1 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4
## 2 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4
## 3 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1
## 4 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1
## 5 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2
## 6 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
Exercise: What if assigning NA (Not Available) instead of NULL? The purpose here is to try to understand the two closely-related concepts.
See also: The confusing names() and colnames(), R-blogger post