CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Al14
Al14

Reputation: 1814

Use a row as colname

I want to take a row and use it to set the colnames example below

df1a = data.frame(Customer = c("A", "a",1:8),  Product = c("B", "b",11:18))
colnames(df1a)<-df1a[2,]

Expected output

   a  b
1  A  B
2  a  b
3  1 11
4  2 12
5  3 13
6  4 14
7  5 15
8  6 16
9  7 17
10 8 18

I think the problem is that df1a[2,] is a data frame

Upvotes: 1

Views: 55

Answers (2)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 886938

Here the columns are factor class as by default stringsAsFactors = TRUE in the data.frame call. So, the values that got changed are the integer storage values of the factor rather than the acutal values

df1a <- data.frame(Customer = c("A", "a",1:8), 
      Product = c("B", "b",11:18), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

and then do the assignment 

names(df1a) <- unlist(df1a[2,])

Or as @Ryan mentioned, unlist is not needed

names(df1a) <- df1a[2,]

Upvotes: 4

RHertel
RHertel

Reputation: 23788

You can change the names without generating a new data.frame:

names(df1a) <- lapply(df1a[2,], as.character)

Upvotes: 2

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