Rename columns of a data frame by searching column name

Question

I am writing a wrapper to ggplot to produce multiple graphs based on various datasets. As I am passing the column names to the function, I need to rename the column names so tha

Answer 1

I second @justin's aes_string suggestion. But for future renaming you can try.

require(stringr)
df <- data.frame(col1=1:3,col2=3:5,col3=6:8)
oldNames <- c("col1", "col2", "col3")
newNames <- c("new_col1", "new_col2", "new_col3")
names(df) <- str_replace(string=names(df), pattern=oldNames, replacement=newNames)