Column renaming
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 12:08 PM, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Chip Barnaby <cbarnaby at wrightsoft.com> wrote:
> Yes, someone else pointed out my typo, sorry. > > My issue here is that referring to columns by index is risky. Hard-coded > indices will be buried in code and there will be trouble if (when) the data > organization changes. So I am trying to learn how to work with names, but > the language does not seem to allow that approach without some awkwardness. > I guess I could write some helper functions.
There's the rename function in the reshape package:
library(reshape)
X <- rename(X, c("bob" = "sue")
Or if you just want the function:
rename <- function (x, replace) {
replacement <- replace[names(x)]
names(x)[!is.na(replacement)] <- replacement[!is.na(replacement)]
x
}
Hadley