Modern R Programming Cookbook

How it works…

The data.frame() function works similarly to the cbind() function, but it preserves data types of each of the columns. In the cbind() function, all the columns are converted to character if any of the columns are of character type. See the conversion rules in the earlier recipe, Creating a vector and accessing its properties for more details.

The other functions such as nrow(), ncol(), and colnames() work in the same way as they do in a matrix. The str() function is a special function to know the structure of the data frame. It gives the output of data types for each column, along with the first few values of the columns and column names.

To get access to a column, you can use the dollar sign $ next to the data frame name, such ...