top_n function

Select top (or bottom) n rows (by value)

top_n() has been superseded in favour of slice_min()/slice_max(). While it will not be deprecated in the near future, retirement means that we will only perform critical bug fixes, so we recommend moving to the newer alternatives.

top_n() was superseded because the name was fundamentally confusing as it returned what you might reasonably consider to be the bottom

rows. Additionally, the wt variable had a confusing name, and strange default (the last column in the data frame). Unfortunately we could not see an easy way to fix the existing top_n() function without breaking existing code, so we created a new alternative.

top_n(x, n, wt)

top_frac(x, n, wt)

Arguments

• x: A data frame.
• n: Number of rows to return for top_n(), fraction of rows to return for top_frac(). If n is positive, selects the top rows. If negative, selects the bottom rows. If x is grouped, this is the number (or fraction) of rows per group. Will include more rows if there are ties.
• wt: (Optional). The variable to use for ordering. If not specified, defaults to the last variable in the tbl.

Examples

df <- data.frame(x = c(6, 4, 1, 10, 3, 1, 1))

df %>% top_n(2)  # highest values
df %>% top_n(-2) # lowest values
# now use
df %>% slice_max(x, n = 2)
df %>% slice_min(x, n = 2)

# top_frac() -> prop argument of slice_min()/slice_max()
df %>% top_frac(.5)
# ->
df %>% slice_max(x, prop = 0.5)