I want to generate a set of 1000 random numbers between 1 and 20000 to then use those to subset a dataframe.
sample.int(20000, 2000, replace = TRUE) Then I want to copy/paste these numbers into this vector
df_sub <- df[,c(65,25,1,6000,1056, ...)] Is this possible?
No need to copy/paste, just sample directly in the indexing operation:
For example, to randomly select 1000 rows between 1 and 20000 (with replacement):
df[sample(1:20000, 1000, replace=T),] Another option is to use dplyr's row_number() function to get the row id and sample the rows
df %>% mutate(row_id=row_number()) %>% slice_sample(n=1000) To get the row ids
df %>% mutate(row_id=row_number()) %>% slice_sample(n=1000) %>% pull(row_id) 
row_id is doing nothing in the first chunk of code other than add a column to the data.frame that contains the row number. The sampling is completely independent of the variable.You can use clipr to write the vector to your clipboard.
library(dplyr) s <- sample.int(20000, 2000, replace = TRUE) vectorToCopy <- s %>% stringr::str_c(",", collapse=" ") %>% # sep each element by comma stringr::str_sub(., 1, nchar(.)-1) %>% # remove last comma str_c("c(", ., ")") # add parentheses clipr::write_clip(vectorToCopy) # write to clipboard 
var <- sample(20000, 1000, TRUE)then use the var to subsetdf[sample(1:20000, 1000, replace=T),]