Ignoring case in d(b)plyr verbs

Question

The database I am querying does not respect case when it comes to column names. for example the following columns exist in different tables:

PERSONID PERSONiD PersonID Personid PersonId

Using standard d(b)plyr verbs is getting very frustrating. Is it possible to turn off the case sensitivity for dbplyr verbs?

PostgreSQL for example returns column names in all lower case, while Oracle returns them in all upper case. If you want to write code that will run on either platform, you have this problem. — Andrew Schulman, May 13 '19 at 22:49

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 14 '19 at 15:44

2

You can change all of the column names of your result to a consistent case with rename_all. For example to make them all lower case:

rename_all(df, tolower)

answered May 14 '19 at 15:44

Andrew Schulman

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '18 at 21:38

I think this can be done by using regular expression when selecing data columns.

A very much similar question with answer can be found at select-columns-of-data-table-based-on-regex.

In your case, regular expression might be written as [Pp][Ee][Rr][Ss][Ii][Dd].

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 31 '18 at 21:36

0

Or you can change the column names of your dataframe (df) to lowercase using:

 names(df) <- tolower(names(df))

answered Aug 31 '18 at 21:36

Shirin Yavari

2

Or start the chain by `tbl(con, df) %>% rename_all(toupper) %>% ...`, not sure if it's supported though – moodymudskipper Sep 03 '18 at 19:32
Yes, it is supported. It's one of the examples in the [docs](https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/select_all.html). – Andrew Schulman Jun 20 '19 at 08:39

3 Answers3