Unable to find an inherited method for function ‘select’ for signature ‘"data.frame"’

Question

Problem :

I want to select some columns from my data frame by the use of below code:

library(dplyr)

dv %>% select(LGA)

select(dv, LGA)

Both of them are failing with below error :

Unable to find an inherited method for function ‘select’ for signature ‘"data.frame"’

But my following code gives me desired output :

dplyr::select(dv, LGA)

Is there a confliction in packages?

My all libraries imported are as below:

library(jsonlite)

library(geojsonio)

library(dplyr)

library(ggmap)

library(geojson)

library(leaflet)

library(mapview)

library(RColorBrewer)

library(scales)

I' am very new to R, so need guidance in resolving the problems like this?

Answer 1

When you call select, R will searche through the "search path" and will matche the first function called select. And when you try to call dplyr::select then you are calling it directly from the namespace dplyr so the function will work as expected.

Below is an example using conflicted. We will try to load the raster and dplyr, here both of them have a select function.

library(dplyr)

library(raster)

library(conflicted)

d <- data.frame(a = 1:10, b = 1:10)

Now when we try to call select we will be prompted with the exact conflict:

> select(d, a)

Error: [conflicted] `select` found in 2 packages.

Either pick the one you want with `::` 

* raster::select

* dplyr::select

Or declare a preference with `conflict_prefer()`

* conflict_prefer("select", "raster")

* conflict_prefer("select", "dplyr")