UPCOMING WEBINAR: Faster (and better) survey analysis Register now >>

Articles in this section

See more

How to Filter Cases in the Data Editor Using R

  • Updated
Follow

You are able to apply filters in the Data Editor to highlight only certain cases in the data. This is most useful when you want to delete cases based on a filter, but can also help with sorting/filtering the data for manual editing as well. You can use R to create filters to help with this. Some common examples of when you may want to do this using R are below. These are all example code you can copy and modify within your R filter variable.

 

Requirements

Please note these steps require a Displayr license.

Method - Based on a User Identifier Variable

#identify the respondent id you want to match your list of identifiers to
thevar = UID

#provide a list of ids to remove
#if your id variable is in a Numeric structure you should remove the double quotes below
theids = c("ab123","245ghs")

#create logic for the filter to flag the ids to delete
thevar %in% theids

 

Method - Based on Case Number

#choose a single variable to use to see how many cases are in the data set
refvar = Q1

#make a list of cases to delete based on their row number in the data set
thecases = c(1,2,3,4)

#create the filter initially with all 0s which excludes all respondents
thefilter = rep(0,length(refvar)) 

#change only the cases you want to delete to a 1 to be filtered in
thefilter[thecases] = 1

#return the final result
thefilter

 

Method - Duplicate Records

The code for this is discussed in more depth in How to Remove Duplicate Cases From a Data Set.

 

Method - Based on response(s)

Typically you can create a filter based on specific responses in our filtering tool, but sometimes you may need more complex logic or logic that's not supported.

#this example will flag users whose response in Q1 was more than Q2
Q1 > Q2

Though you can do the following without R CODE by creating a Calculation Screenshot 2024-04-22 133830.png > Sum > SumEachRow variable and using that in the filtering tool, you can also do it in R CODE:

#this example will flag users whose responses in a variable set don't add up to 100
theset = `Your Variable Set Label Here in Backticks`

#perform the logic
SumEachRow(theset) != 100

More examples of creating filters in R can be found in How to Use R Code to Create a Filter Based on Single-Response Questions and logic statement examples in How to Work with Conditional R Formulas.

 

Additional Notes

  • If appropriate to your scenario, you may want to look into the seq() function which can create a series of numbers automatically following a pattern. 
  • If working with ids that follow a pattern/sequence, you may also look into How to Use Paste Functions to Create Dynamic Text Using R for how to use paste() to automatically create a list of ids following a pattern.

 

Next

How to Delete Cases From a Data Set

How to Filter Raw Data Using R

Related articles