data.frame without ruining column names

Question

Is there a way to use data.frame without it ruining the column names?

I have following structure:

$`Canon PowerShot`
[1] 9.997803e-01 9.997318e-01 3         


        

Answer 1

You can stop R changing the names to syntatically valid names by setting check.names = FALSE. See ?data.frame for details.

# assuming your data is in a list called my_list
do.call(data.frame, c(my_list, check.names = FALSE))

Answer 2

data.frames in R are actually lists. Therefore, this is also valid:

data.frame(my_list, check.names = FALSE)

Knowing this opens up the possibilities of using lapply on data.frames, which I think is pretty cool:

my_data <- data.frame(my_list, check.names = FALSE)
lapply(my_data, IQR)