Using columns with special characters in formulae in R

Question

I\'m trying to make a decision tree using rpart using a data frame that has ~200 columns. Some of these columns have numbers in their names, some have special characters (e.

Answer 1

Joran's comment on my question is the answer - I didn't know of the existence of make.names()

Joran, if you reply as an answer I'll mark you as correct. Cheers!