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`

Answer 2

use stringsAsFactors = F in data.frame which will create columns as char instead of factors. then make names on it.

df <- data.frame(A=c("Some messy string to be used",222,0), 
             B=c("Very important ? indicator from 2001", 888, 44),
             C=c("001 This variable / makes no sense", 888, 44),
             D=c("Geography", 1, 2),stringsAsFactors = F)
names(df) <- make.names(df[1,])
names(df)