R: extract column from xts object as a vector

A quickie for the R language... you will look at the answer and think it is hardly worth writing a blog post over. Well it turns out that everyone has thought the same... which is why it took me over half an hour of failed searching and trial and error to work it out.

I've an XTS object, x, and I've added a column which is the sum of the other columns:

  x$sum=apply(x,1,sum)

print(x$sum) shows me the sum for each row, along with the datestamp of that row. I.e. x$sum is still an XTS object. Normally this is good, but I wanted it as a simple vector, without the dates associated. Here is how you do that:

  as.vector(x$sum)

Why did I want that? Simply because summary(x$sum) uses up 7 lines, half of it being noise about the datestamps; summary(as.vector(x$sum)) is 2 lines, all signal, no noise.