How to do it…

Let's take a look at the following steps to learn how to create a data frame in R:

1. To create a data frame in R, you will have to use a function called data.frame(). This function is the convenient way to create a data frame. Within the data.frame() function, it contains the named vector that ultimately represents columns of the dataset. Each column's data type could be very different from another. For example, one column could be numeric, another column could be character, and the other columns could be logical. Here is an example of creating a small data frame object using the data.frame() function:

            datA <- data.frame(ID = 1:5, hourSpetOnInternet = 
            c(5,3,4,1,2), GENDER = c("M", "F", "F", "M", "F"))

1. After creating the data frame, you can now check the properties of it as follows:
   • Data type of each of the columns
   • Number of rows
   • Number of columns
   • Names of the columns
   • Printing the content of the data frame
   • Printing the first and last few rows of the data frame
   • Accessing a single column
2. To determine the data types of each column, execute the following code snippet:

        str(datA)

        > str(datA)'data.frame':  5 obs. of  3 variables: 
        $ ID                : int  1 2 3 4 5 
        $ hourSpetOnInternet: num  5 3 4 1 2 
        $ GENDER            : Factor w/ 2 levels "F","M": 2 1 1 2 1

        nrow(datA) # to know number of rows in the data frame
        ncol(datA) # to know number of columns in the data frame
        head(datA, n=2)  # print first 2 rows of the data frame
        tail(datA, n=2) # print last 2 rows of the data frame
        datA$ID # to get access to ID variable only
        datA[["ID"]] # to get access to ID variable only
        names(datA) # to get column names of the data frame
        colnames(datA) # to get column names of the data frame