assign headers based on existing row in dataframe in R

Question

After transforming a dataframe  I would like to assign heads names to the columns based on an existing row   My headers are currently    row names   X2  X3  X4  X5  X6  X7  X8  X9        I would like to get rid of that and use the following row as column headers  without having to type them out since I have many    The only solution I have for this is to export and re-load the data  with header T

User · Answer

Try this   colnames DF    DF 1      the first row will be the header DF   DF -1               removing the first row    However  get a look if the data has been properly read  If you data frame has numeric variables but the first row were characters  all the data has been read as character  To avoid this problem  it s better to save the data and read again with header TRUE as you suggest  You can also get a look to this question  Reading a CSV file organized horizontally

User · Answer

Very similar to Vishnu s answer but uses the lapply to map all the data to characters then to assign them as the headers  This is really helpful if your data is imported as factors   DF    lt - lapply DF  as character  colnames DF   lt - DF 1    DF  lt - DF -1      note that that if you have a lot of numeric data or factors you want you ll need to convert them back  In this case it may make sense to store the character data frame  extract the row you want  and then apply it to the original data frame  tempDF  lt - DF tempDF    lt - lapply DF  as character  colnames DF   lt - tempDF 1    DF  lt - DF -1    tempDF  lt - NULL

User · Answer

The cleanest way is use a function of janitor package that is built for exactly this purpose  janitor  row to names DF 1   If you want to use any other row than the first one  pass it in the second parameter

User · Answer

A new answer that uses dplyr and tidyr   Extracts the desired column names and converts to a list  library tidyverse   col names  lt - raw dta   gt      slice 2    gt     pivot longer      cols    X2   X10     until last named column     names to    old names       values to    new names     gt      pull new names    Removes the incorrect rows and adds the correct column names  dta  lt - raw dta   gt      slice -1  -2    gt     Removes the rows containing new and original names   set names    nm   col names

User · Answer

The key here is to unlist the row first   colnames DF   lt - as character unlist DF 1     DF   DF -1

[r] assign headers based on existing row in dataframe in R

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