Changing column names of a data frame

Question

I have a data frame called  newprice   see below  and I want to change the column names in my program in R    gt  newprice    Chang   Chang    Chang  1     100       36      136 2     120      -33       87 3     150       14      164   In fact this is what am doing   names newprice  1  lt -paste  premium   names newprice  2  lt -paste  change   names newprice  3  lt -paste  newprice      I have not put this in a loop because I want each column name to be different as you see   When I paste my program into R console this is the output it gives me    gt  names newprice  1  lt -paste    premium     Error  unexpected input in  names newprice  1  lt -paste       gt  names newprice  2  lt -paste    change     Error  unexpected input in  names newprice  2  lt -paste       gt  names newprice  3  lt -paste    newpremium     Error  unexpected input in  names newprice  3  lt -paste        I have equally tried using the c   function-for example c  premium    instead of the paste   function  but to no avail   Could someone help me to figure this out

User · Answer

If you need to rename not all but multiple column at once when you only know the old column names you can use colnames function and %in% operator. Example:

df = data.frame(bad=1:3, worse=rnorm(3), worst=LETTERS[1:3])

   bad      worse    worst
1   1 -0.77915455       A
2   2  0.06717385       B
3   3 -0.02827242       C

Now you want to change "bad" and "worst" to "good" and "best". You can use

colnames(df)[which(colnames(df) %in% c("bad","worst") )] <- c("good","best")

This results in

  good      worse  best
1    1 -0.6010363    A
2    2  0.7336155    B
3    3  0.9435469    C

User · Answer

Just to correct and slightly extend Scott Wilson answer  You can use data table s setnames function on data frames too     Do not expect speed up of the operation but you can expect the setnames to be more efficient for memory consumption as it updates column names by reference  This can be tracked with address function  see below       library data table  set seed 123  n   1e8  df   data frame bad sample 1 3  n  TRUE   worse rnorm n   address df    1   0x208f9f00  colnames df   lt - c  good    better   address df    1   0x208fa1d8  rm df   dt   data table bad sample 1 3  n  TRUE   worse rnorm n   address dt    1   0x535c830  setnames dt  c  good    better    address dt    1   0x535c830  rm dt    So if you are hitting your memory limits you may consider to use this one instead

User · Answer

Try  names newprice  1   lt -  quot premium quot

User · Answer

The error is caused by the  smart-quotes   or whatever they re called    The lesson here is   don t write your code in an  editor  that converts quotes to smart-quotes    names newprice  1  lt -paste    premium        error names newprice  1  lt -paste  premium      works   Also  you don t need paste  premium    the call to paste is redundant  and it s a good idea to put spaces around  lt - to avoid confusion  e g  x  lt - -10  if x lt -3   hi  else  bye   x

User · Answer

You can just do the editing by   newprice  lt - edit newprice    and change the column name manually

User · Answer

This may be helpful   rename columns function df changelist      renames columns of a dataframe   for i in 1 length names df         if length changelist  names df  i     gt 0         names df  i   changelist  names df  i                df      Specify new dataframe df rename columns df list old column  new column name

User · Answer

Use this to change column name by colname function   colnames newprice  1     premium  colnames newprice  2     change  colnames newprice  3     newprice

User · Answer

I use this   colnames dataframe  which names dataframe      columnName     lt -  newColumnName

User · Answer

Use the colnames   function   R gt  X  lt - data frame bad 1 3  worse rnorm 3   R gt  X   bad     worse 1   1 -2 440467 2   2  1 320113 3   3 -0 306639 R gt  colnames X   lt - c  good    better   R gt  X   good    better 1    1 -2 440467 2    2  1 320113 3    3 -0 306639   You can also subset   R gt  colnames X  2   lt -  superduper

User · Answer

I had the same issue and this piece of code worked out for me   names data  names data      oldVariableName    lt -  newVariableName    In short  this code does the following   names data  looks into all the names in the dataframe  data    names data     oldVariableName  extracts the variable name  oldVariableName  you want to get renamed and  lt -  newVariableName  assigns the new variable name

User · Answer

Similar to the others   cols  lt - c  premium   change   newprice   colnames dataframe   lt - cols   Quite simple and easy to modify

User · Answer

In case we have 2 dataframes the following works   DF1 lt -data frame  a    b    DF2 lt -data frame  c   d     We change names of DF1 as follows   colnames DF1  lt - colnames DF2

User · Answer

The new recommended way to do this is to use the setNames function   See   setNames   Since this creates a new copy of the data frame  be sure to assign the result to the original data frame  if that is your intention   data frame  lt - setNames data frame  c  premium   change   newprice      Newer versions of R will give you warning if you use colnames in some of the ways suggested by earlier answers   If this were a data table instead  you could use the data table function setnames  which can modify specific column names or a single column name by reference   setnames data table   old-name    new-name

User · Answer

try   names newprice   lt - c  premium    change    newprice

User · Answer

There are a couple options with dplyr  rename   and dplyr  select     library dplyr   mtcars   gt      tibble  rownames to column  car model     gt                                convert rowname to a column  tibble must be installed    select car model  est mpg   mpg  horse power   hp  everything      gt       rename specific columns and reorder   rename weight   wt  cylinders   cyl    gt                                   another option for renaming specific columns that keeps everything by default   head 2        car model est mpg horse power cylinders disp drat weight  qsec vs am gear carb 1     Mazda RX4      21         110         6  160  3 9  2 620 16 46  0  1    4    4 2 Mazda RX4 Wag      21         110         6  160  3 9  2 875 17 02  0  1    4    4   There are also three scoped variants of dplyr  rename    dplyr  rename all   for all column names  dplyr  rename if   for conditionally targeting column names  and dplyr  rename at   for select named columns  The following example replaces spaces and periods with an underscore and converts everything to lower case   iris   gt       rename all  gsub    s                   gt      rename all tolower    gt      head 2    sepal length sepal width petal length petal width species 1          5 1         3 5          1 4         0 2  setosa 2          4 9         3 0          1 4         0 2  setosa   dplyr  select all   can also be used in a similar way   iris   gt       select all  gsub    s                   gt      select all tolower    gt      head 2    sepal length sepal width petal length petal width species 1          5 1         3 5          1 4         0 2  setosa 2          4 9         3 0          1 4         0 2  setosa

User · Answer

My column names is as below  colnames t   1   Class      Sex        Age        Survived   Freq     I want to change column name of Class and Sex  colnames t  c  STD   Gender   AGE   SURVIVED   FREQ

[r] Changing column names of a data frame

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