I'm working with a data frame in r where my row names are meaningful. Hence, I would like to give the column of row names a name. How do I do this?
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It sounds like you want to convert the rownames to a proper column of the data.frame. eg:
# add the rownames as a proper column
myDF <- cbind(Row.Names = rownames(myDF), myDF)
myDF
# Row.Names id val vr2
# row_one row_one A 1 23
# row_two row_two A 2 24
# row_three row_three B 3 25
# row_four row_four C 4 26
If you want to then remove the original rownames:
rownames(myDF) <- NULL
myDF
# Row.Names id val vr2
# 1 row_one A 1 23
# 2 row_two A 2 24
# 3 row_three B 3 25
# 4 row_four C 4 26
Alternatively, if all of your data is of the same class (ie, all numeric, or all string), you can convert to Matrix and name the dimnames
myMat <- as.matrix(myDF)
names(dimnames(myMat)) <- c("Names.of.Rows", "")
myMat
# Names.of.Rows id val vr2
# row_one "A" "1" "23"
# row_two "A" "2" "24"
# row_three "B" "3" "25"
# row_four "C" "4" "26"
The tibble package now has a dedicated function that converts row names to an explicit variable.
library(tibble)
rownames_to_column(mtcars, var="das_Auto") %>% head
Gives:
das_Auto mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
1 Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4
2 Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4
3 Datsun 710 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1
4 Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1
5 Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2
6 Valiant 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
Source: Stackoverflow.com