Does R Have a Wildcard Expression (Such as an Asterisk (*))?

Try,

df[grep("^Andy",rownames(df)),]

the first argument of grep is a pattern, a regular expression. grep gives back the rows that contain the pattern given in this first argument. the ^ means beginning with.

Let's make this reproducible:

 df <- data.frame(x=c(12,14,56,34,45,45))
 rownames(df) <- c("AndyBullxxx", "AlexPullxcx","AndyPamxvb", "RickRalldfg","AndyPantert","SamSaltedf")
 ## see what grep does
 grep("^Andy",rownames(df))

If you are not comfortable with regex there is a function in the utils package, which can convert wildcard based expressions to regex. So you can do

df[grepl(glob2rx('Andy*'), rownames(df)),]

I think you want to go for a regular expression:

subset(Data1, grepl("^\bAndy", Name))

or

Data1[grepl("^\bAndy", Data1$Name),]

In the regular expression the "^" stands for startswith, and \b for the next set of characters is going to be a word. Regular expressions are a powerful text processing tool that require some study. There are a lot of tutorials and websites online. One of them that I use is:

I can't use R right now (my wifes laptop ;)), so these pieces of code go untested. Maybe next time provide us with an example dataset, that makes it really easy to provide a working example.