R: dplyr - Rename column name by position instead of name

Question

I want to know if there is a way to rename column names by position of the column, rather than changing by column name.

Below snippet shows how to change by name.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))

gd_url  <- "http://tiny.cc/gapminder"
gtbl  <- gd_url %>%
  read.delim %>%
  tbl_df

gtbl  <- gtbl %>% rename(life_exp = lifeExp, 
                         gdp_percap = gdpPercap)
gtbl

So how would you like to do the renaming? It's not quite clear what the approach you are after is. — A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1, Apr 12 '15 at 05:39
If you choose certain columns and change names, you could do something like `select(gtbl, life_exp = 5)`. — jazzurro, Apr 12 '15 at 05:43
Wouldn't this be easier to do `names(gtbl)[5:6] <- c('life_exp', 'gdp_percap')` — akrun, Apr 12 '15 at 06:07
Thanks... So the answer is, it cannot be done (in dplyr way) and there is a good reason for it :) — vikas, Apr 14 '15 at 00:18
Related questions: [How to dplyr rename a column, by column index?](https://stackoverflow.com/q/42769650/1895415) and [Rename data frame columns, specified by column index, as a function of those indices](https://stackoverflow.com/q/75795602/1895415) — Silverfish, Mar 20 '23 at 21:46

score 59 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 26 '18 at 17:45

59

Much simpler: you can rename a column just by using numbers. This works:

df <- df %>% 
        rename(newNameForFirstColumn = 1, newNameForSecondColumn = 2)

answered Jul 26 '18 at 17:45

Max Shron

946
7
6

score 20 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 14 '17 at 15:45

If you prefer to stick within the dplyr pipe-world, as of dplyr 0.7.2 it is possible to rename by position using the following nomenclature:

Using your original example:

gtbl  <- gtbl %>% rename("life_exp" = !!names(.[5]),
                         "gdp_percap" = !!names(.[6]))

Regards for dredging up an older post. I had a similar problem and viewed this question before figuring out this alternative solution.

R: dplyr - Rename column name by position instead of name

2 Answers2

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