How to add a space to an object name in R

Question

Piston_Rings<-diameter[1:25,]

I want my quality control graph NOT to have the underscore in the object name.

Answer 1

At the moment there is an underscore (not a hyphen) in that object name. It is possible to construct objects whose names have spaces in them but in order to access them you will then always need to use backticks in order to get the interpreter to understand what you want:

> `Piston Rings` <- list(1,2)
> `Piston Rings`[[1]]
[1] 1
> `Piston Rings`[[2]]
[1] 2

The problem you incur is cluttering up your code, at least relative to obeying the usual conventions in R where a space is a token-ending marker to the parser. Hyphens (at least short-hyphens) are actually minus signs.

If on the other hand you only want to use a modified version of a name that contains an underscore as the title for a graph, then try something like this:

 Piston_Rings <- list()   # just for testing purposes so there will be an object.
 plot( 1:10,10:1, main = sub("_", " ", quote(Piston_Rings))  )

Answer 2

@BondedDust's answer is correct, but (guessing, since you haven't been very specific) a simpler way to get what you want is just to specify xlab or ylab arguments to the plot() function. Let's say you have variables stuff (x) and Piston_Rings (y). If you just

plot(stuff,Piston_Rings)

then the plot will have "Piston_Rings" as the y-axis label. But if you

plot(stuff,Piston_Rings,ylab="Piston Rings")

you'll get the label you want. You can also include lots more information this way:

plot(stuff,Piston_Rings,
     xlab="Important stuff (really)",
     ylab="Piston Rings (number per segment)")

See ?plot.default for many more options.