Using syntactically difficult strings as column names in a data frame

Question

I\'m working with a data frame similar to the extract below:

df <- data.frame(A=c(\"Some messy string to be used\",222,0), 
                 B=c(\"Very import         


        

Answer 1

You don’t need to use make.names at all — you can assign the strings directly. This works perfectly fine in R. You just need to backtick-quote the names when you try to use them as R names (e.g. after the $ operator):

names(df) = unlist(df[1,])
df$`Some messy string to be used`