How to append a string to subset of variable names in R?

Question

I am trying to alter a select few of my variable names in a data frame. How can I do this without typing each of the old names and each of the new names? I thought the code below might work but it hasn't. I am trying to append "Econ" to each of the existing names identified in the data frame.

    names(wb.misc)[3,13,14,20,22,47,61,62,64,68,73] <- 
         paste("Econ", names(wb.misc)[3,13,14,20,22,47,61,62,64,68,73], sep = "-")

welcome to SO :) [you might like #005](http://www.twotorials.com/) — Anthony Damico, Feb 23 '13 at 22:31

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 23 '13 at 22:14

10

You need to put c() around the indices

 names(wb.misc)[c(3,13,14,20,22,47,61,62,64,68,73)] = paste("Econ", names(wb.misc)[c(3,13,14,20,22,47,61,62,64,68,73)], sep = "-")

answered Feb 23 '13 at 22:14

adibender

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 05 '15 at 04:26

One way to efficiently get the variable names is to use dput(names(df)) where df is your data.frame.

For example, using the built-in dataset airquality, you can do the following

dput(names(airquality))

Which gives you:

c("Ozone", "Solar.R", "Wind", "Temp", "Month", "Day")

You can then edit to extract the columns you want without having to type them from scratch. E.g., say you want to rename the following three variables, you could use rename.vars in gdata.

vars <- c("Ozone",  "Wind", "Temp")
library(gdata)
rename.vars(airquality, from=vars, to=paste0("Econ", vars))

Using actual variable names will also generally make your code more reliable.

How to append a string to subset of variable names in R?

2 Answers2

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