Change Column name of a dataset in R

Question

I'm a complete newbie and am trying to change column names of a dataset in R. For example, to change the column name of 'Eth' in dataset quine to 'Ethnic'. Any help or the name of the function is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The function 'colnames' is what you're looking for

let's say that 'Eth' is the third column, do

colnames(dataset)[3]<-"Ethnic"

colnames(dataset) returns exactly what you think it should, but you can also use it to set column names.

Doing the following

colnames(dataset)<-newColNames

where newColNames is a vector of names of the same length as the number of columns in dataset will change all the column names in order.

The following (as I did above)

colnames(dataset)[i]<-name

where name is a string and i is an integer, will change the name of the ith column to whatever the string "name" is