Removing first duplicate dataframe

Question

I have a dataframe with several columns. One of them is an user ID column, in this column, I have several ids that can be repeated several times.

What I want to do is remove the first ID, for instance:

1,2,3,4,3,4,2,1,3,4,6,7,7

I would like to have an output like this:

3,4,2,1,3,4,7

Where is what I have done:

#find first duplicated of the each user
dup <- duplicated(results$user)

#create other data frame, every time vector is TRUE add the row to new dataframe
results1 <- NULL

for(i in 1:length(results$user)){
    if (dup[i] == TRUE) {
        rbind(results1, results[i,]) -> results1
    }
 }

Since I'm more used to think in Python, I have a feeling this is a very ugly solution for R. I would like to have some feedback, as well as some pointers on how to improve this piece of code.

Answer 1

Here's a more efficient solution:

# an example data frame
results <- data.frame(user = c(1,2,3,4,3,4,2,1,3,4,6,7,7), a = 1)

# the solution
results[duplicated(results$user), ]

How it works: duplicated returns a logical vector indicating whether a value was also present at a preceding position in the vector (for each value of results$user).

This logical index is used to choose the appropriate lines of the orginal data frame. This is achieved by using this vector as the first argument for [ and using an empty second argument (to select all columns).

The result:

   user a
5     3 1
6     4 1
7     2 1
8     1 1
9     3 1
10    4 1
13    7 1

Answer 2

Well after reading some stuffs, I've come to the conclusion that I could eliminate several lines and do this instead:

rbind(results1, results[dup,]) -> results1

It is much quicker and seems more efficient.

However any suggestions or recommendations are welcome :)