[datatable-help] Column Name Masking Variable

[Bernstein, Elliot J]

I'm running into an issue where a data.table has a column with the same name as a variable, and I would like to reference the variable in an i expression.

For example,

library(data.table)

x <- data.table(y = 1:10, z = 11:20)
setkey(x, y)

z <- data.table(y = 1:5, w = 21:25)
setkey(z, y)

I want to extract the subset of x with values of y that are not in the y column of the data.table z. I can do the following:

ind <- setdiff(x[,y], z[,y])
x[ind]

But I can't do the following:

x[setdiff(y, z[,y])]

because it tries to use the column z instead of the data.table z. Is there any way to get around that? I tried using "with = FALSE", but that only seems to apply to the j expression.

Thank you for your help.

- Elliot
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