1 Goal

The goal of this tutorial is to rename the variables of a dataframe.

2 Data import

# For this tutorial we are going to use the iris dataset
data("iris")
summary(iris)
##   Sepal.Length    Sepal.Width     Petal.Length    Petal.Width   
##  Min.   :4.300   Min.   :2.000   Min.   :1.000   Min.   :0.100  
##  1st Qu.:5.100   1st Qu.:2.800   1st Qu.:1.600   1st Qu.:0.300  
##  Median :5.800   Median :3.000   Median :4.350   Median :1.300  
##  Mean   :5.843   Mean   :3.057   Mean   :3.758   Mean   :1.199  
##  3rd Qu.:6.400   3rd Qu.:3.300   3rd Qu.:5.100   3rd Qu.:1.800  
##  Max.   :7.900   Max.   :4.400   Max.   :6.900   Max.   :2.500  
##        Species  
##  setosa    :50  
##  versicolor:50  
##  virginica :50  
##                 
##                 
##

3 How to rename variables

3.1 Rename by name

# First we make a copy of the dataset
iris_copy <- iris
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Species"
# Change species column for plants
names(iris_copy)[which(names(iris_copy) == "Species")] <- "Plants"
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Plants"

3.2 Rename by column number

# First we make a copy of the dataset
iris_copy <- iris
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Species"
# Change species column for plants
names(iris_copy)[5] <- "Plants"
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Plants"

3.3 Rename all columns

# First we make a copy of the dataset
iris_copy <- iris
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Species"
# Change species column for plants
names(iris_copy) <- c("Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width",  "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width", "Plants")
names(iris_copy)
## [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width"  "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" 
## [5] "Plants"

4 Conclusion

In this tutorial we have learnt how to rename columns with different methods.