R - Rename all column titles right of matching string in column title

Question

I have imported an XLSX files where each column title originally is formatted like "[idNo] nameNo". When I import the xlsx using read_excel, each column name is now:

"[id1]\nname1"    "[id2]\nname2"     "[id3]\nname3" ......... "[idn]\nnamen

How can I rename all the columns by looking right of the '\n' and retain the 'nameNo' only:

"name1"    "name2"    "name3" ....... "namen"

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You could use sub to strip off the unwanted content, for a base R option:

names(df) <- sub("^.*\n", "", names(df))

Using the dplyr library:

df <- df %>% rename_with(~sub(".*\n", "", .))

Answer 2

You can remove everything until '\n'

names(df) <- sub('.*\n', '', names(df))

In dplyr :

library(dplyr)
df <- df %>% rename_with(~sub('.*\n', '', .))