Change selected elements of character vector

Question

Is there a shorter version for the folowing principle to rename certain columns of a data frame?

data1<-data.frame(\"a\"=1:3,\"b\"=1:3,\"c\"=1:3)

data1Names&         


        

Answer 1

The data.table package has a setnames function that will work on data.frames

library(data.table)
data1<-data.frame("a"=1:3,"b"=1:3,"c"=1:3)
#setnames(data1, "a", "hello")
#setnames(data1, "c", "world")
# or in one step
setnames(data1, c("a", "c"), c("hello", "world"))
data1
#  hello b world
#1     1 1     1
#2     2 2     2
#3     3 3     3

All of the answers so far will make a copy of the data.frame. setnames has the added benefit that it changes the names by reference, without making a copy of the data.frame.