R dplyr: rename variables using string functions

Question

(Somewhat related question: Enter new column names as string in dplyr's rename function)

In the middle of a dplyr chain (%>%), I wou

Answer 1

I think you're looking at the documentation for plyr::rename, not dplyr::rename. You would do something like this with dplyr::rename:

iris %>% rename_(.dots=setNames(names(.), tolower(gsub("\\.", "_", names(.)))))

Answer 2

For this particular [but fairly common] case, the function has already been written in the janitor package:

library(janitor)

iris %>% clean_names()

##   sepal_length sepal_width petal_length petal_width species
## 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
## 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
## 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa
## .          ...         ...          ...         ...     ...

so all together,

iris %>% 
    clean_names() %>%
    gather(measurement, value, -species) %>%
    group_by(species,measurement) %>%
    summarise(avg_value = mean(value))

## Source: local data frame [12 x 3]
## Groups: species [?]
## 
##       species  measurement avg_value
##        <fctr>        <chr>     <dbl>
## 1      setosa petal_length     1.462
## 2      setosa  petal_width     0.246
## 3      setosa sepal_length     5.006
## 4      setosa  sepal_width     3.428
## 5  versicolor petal_length     4.260
## 6  versicolor  petal_width     1.326
## 7  versicolor sepal_length     5.936
## 8  versicolor  sepal_width     2.770
## 9   virginica petal_length     5.552
## 10  virginica  petal_width     2.026
## 11  virginica sepal_length     6.588
## 12  virginica  sepal_width     2.974

Answer 3

Both select() and select_all() can be used to rename columns.

If you wanted to rename only specific columns you can use select:

iris %>% 
  select(sepal_length = Sepal.Length, sepal_width = Sepal.Width, everything()) %>% 
  head(2)

  sepal_length sepal_width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa

rename does the same thing, just without having to include everything():

iris %>% 
  rename(sepal_length = Sepal.Length, sepal_width = Sepal.Width) %>% 
  head(2)

  sepal_length sepal_width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa

select_all() works on all columns and can take a function as an argument:

iris %>% 
  select_all(tolower)

iris %>% 
  select_all(~gsub("\\.", "_", .)) 

or combining the two:

iris %>% 
  select_all(~gsub("\\.", "_", tolower(.))) %>% 
  head(2)

  sepal_length sepal_width petal_length petal_width species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa

Answer 4

Here's a way around the somewhat awkward rename syntax:

myris <- iris %>% setNames(tolower(gsub("\\.","_",names(.))))

Answer 5

My eloquent attempt using base, stringr and dplyr:

EDIT: library(tidyverse) now includes all three libraries.

library(tidyverse)
library(maggritr) # Though in tidyverse to use %>% pipe you need to call it 
# library(dplyr)
# library(stringr)
# library(maggritr)

names(iris) %<>% # pipes so that changes are apply the changes back
    tolower() %>%
    str_replace_all(".", "_")

I do this for building functions with piping.

my_read_fun <- function(x) {
    df <- read.csv(x) %>%
    names(df) %<>%
        tolower() %>%
        str_replace_all("_", ".")
    tempdf %<>%
        select(a, b, c, g)
}

Answer 6

In case you don't want to write the regular expressions yourself, you could use

• the snakecase-pkg which is very flexible,
• janitor::make_clean_names() which has some nice defaults or
• janitor::clean_names() which does the same as make_clean_names(), but works directly on data frames.

Invoking them inside of a pipeline should be straightforward.

library(magrittr)
library(snakecase)

iris %>% setNames(to_snake_case(names(.)))
iris %>% tibble::as_tibble(.name_repair = to_snake_case)
iris %>% purrr::set_names(to_snake_case)
iris %>% dplyr::rename_all(to_snake_case)
iris %>% janitor::clean_names()