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Nastaran Roknabadi
Nastaran Roknabadi

Reputation: 3

How to change a progression of column names in R

I'm having a problem with changing colnames of one of my matrixes. I need to change the name of columns 1,5,9,.. which makes a progression of numbers by 4. I run the following code but I have no idea why the colnames won't change.

> a=seq(1,72,by=4)
> cols= paste("cancer",a)
> colnames(lcne[,a]) = cols

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong and how I can fix it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 30

Answers (3)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887118

We can also use rename_at

library(dplyr)
newnames <- c('a', 'b', 'c')
mtcars <- mtcars %>%
     rename_at(c(1, 3, 5), ~ newnames)
names(mtcars)
#[1] "a"    "cyl"  "b"    "hp"   "c"    "wt"   "qsec" "vs"   "am"   "gear" "carb"

Upvotes: 0

pascal
pascal

Reputation: 1085

First make a vector with the actual colnames. Then replace the desired ones in the vector and add the whole vector back to the matrix.

nameVec <- names(lcne)
nameVec[a] = cols
colnames(lcne) <- nameVec

Upvotes: 0

SteveM
SteveM

Reputation: 2301

colnames indexes are referenced outside the function. E.g.:

newnames <- c('a', 'b', 'c')
colnames(mtcars)[c(1, 3, 5)]
[1] "mpg"  "disp" "drat"
colnames(mtcars)[c(1, 3, 5)] <- newnames
colnames(mtcars)
 [1] "a"    "cyl"  "b"    "hp"   "c"    "wt"   "qsec" "vs"   "am"   "gear" "carb"

Upvotes: 1

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