How to drop unwanted variables/columns in SAS and R tidyverse?

When working with data, we frequently need to work with only a selected set of variables. For this, we need programming features to drop variables or columns which are not needed for analysis.

There are multiple ways of dropping the variables/columns which are not required in both SAS and R tidyverse. Below is one basic approach in both SAS and R.

Let us assume that we have a dataset named "class" with 5 variables named Name, Sex, Age, Height, Weight.

Let us assume that we do not need Height and Weight for analysis. 

We can create a new subset dataset (tibble/dataframe) using the below code.

SAS code

Notes:

• data statement is used to specify the name of the newly created dataset
• set statement is used to specify the name of the input dataset
• drop statement is used to specify the names of the variables which need to be dropped from the output dataset
• note that sas is not case sensitive in terms of variable/column names

R tidyverse code

Notes:

• tidyverse is loaded into R session using library function
• As haven is not a core tidyverse package, it has be explicitly loaded 
• setwd function is used to set the working directory, working directory is set to the same directory containing the SAS dataset
• read_sas function of haven is used to read the sas dataset into R session as a tibble
• select verb of dplyr of tidyverse is used to drop the variables which are not required for analysis.
• Notice that the variables/columns that need to be dropped are to be prefixed with a minus sign
• The first argument of select verb (function) is the name of the input tibble, followed by the list of variables to be dropped with a minus before the name of the variables each separated by a comma
• note that R is case sensitive in terms of variable/column names - so we need use the same text case

Example class dataset (sas dataset) can be downloaded from here.