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i know that i can change the names of columns using 

colnames(x)<-c("Column1" , "Column 2" ,"Column 3", "Column 4")

If I have 

A<-"Apple"  
B<-"Banana"

What should I do so that the names of the output data frame will have names like this 

"Column 1 Apple" "Column 2 Banana" "Column 3 Apple" "Column 4 Banana"

I have looked at Replace "names" of columns of a data frame with different (new) names in another file in R
and
How to dynamically assign names to dataframes?
But I didn't quite understand how to apply it to my case.

Frank
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kRazzy R
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1 Answers1

3

Just use paste and rely on the fact that R recycles vectors. As @Richard noted, you should avoid spaces in column/variable names to make your life easier. make.names can take care of that:

make.names(paste(names(x), c(A,B)))
#[1] "Column1.Apple"  "Column2.Banana" "Column3.Apple"  "Column4.Banana"
thelatemail
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  • thanks a lot. I just wanted to know , how to apply the above solution selectively to columns of my choice? for instance if I wanted to arrive at an output like this `"Column1.Apple" "Column2" "Column3" "Column4.Banana" ` – kRazzy R Nov 17 '15 at 22:52
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    @kRazzyR - subset your columns as appropriate. `colnames(x)[c(1,4)] <- make.names(paste(names(x)[c(1,4)], c(A,B) ))` – thelatemail Nov 17 '15 at 23:34