Execute dplyr operation only if column exists

Question

Drawing on the discussion on conditional dplyr evaluation I would like conditionally execute a step in pipeline depending on whether the reference column exists in the passed da

Answer 1

This code does the trick and is pretty flexible. The ^ and $ are regex used to perform an exact match.

mtcars %>% 
  set_names(names(.) %>% 
              str_replace("am","1") %>% 
              str_replace("^cyl$","2") %>% 
              str_replace("Doesn't Exist","3")
              )