From a dataframe like this

test <- data.frame('id'= rep(1:5,2), 'string'= LETTERS[1:10])
test <- test[order(test$id), ]
rownames(test) <- 1:10

> test
    id string
 1   1      A
 2   1      F
 3   2      B
 4   2      G
 5   3      C
 6   3      H
 7   4      D
 8   4      I
 9   5      E
 10  5      J

I want to create a new one with the first appearance of each id / string pair. If sqldf accepted R code within it, the query could look like this:

res <- sqldf("select id, min(rownames(test)), string 
              from test 
              group by id, string")

> res
    id string
 1   1      A
 3   2      B
 5   3      C
 7   4      D
 9   5      E

Is there a solution short of creating a new column like

test$row <- rownames(test)

and running the same sqldf query with min(row)?