Also, for context, this bug was spotted via this stackoverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/q/66557375/4183191

I'm simply the middleman :)

Indexing by column name in the dataframe package seems to attempt to match a given string to substrings in existing names (regardless of position).

This seems to create problems when using an exact column name, which also exists as a substring in another column.

E.g.

A = dataframe( [1,2;3,4;5,6;7,8], 'colnames', { 'Close', 'Close1' } );
A.Close
error: subsref.m querying name Close returned positions 1
subsref.m querying name  returned positions
error: called from
    subsref at line 94 column 21

It is unclear if this 'partial matching' behaviour (as opposed to 'exact' matching) is intentional. Perhaps this was trying to mirror R's ability for partial matching, but commented-out code (line 83) seems to suggest that it should be trying to do 'exact' matches instead.

The handling in the case of multiple matches is a bit peculiar in general. E.g. irrespective of the actual error on line 94, I note in the code that at line 86:

86: resu = df.x_data{indi}; %# extract colum;

when multiple matches have occured, and thus indi is non-scalar, as in this case, the above line produces multiple results as a comma-separated-list, but only the first item in this list is captured into resu.

This means that behaviour may change depending on the order in which the various matching column names appear in the dataframe. This may be an intentional design decision, in order to capture only the first matching column, but we can't be sure since it's not documented to point out whether this is explicitly the rationale at that line.