Applying dplyr's rename to all columns while using pipe operator

Question

I'm working with an imported data set that corresponds to the extract below:

set.seed(1)
dta <- data.frame("This is Column One" = runif(n = 10),
                     "Another amazing Column name" = runif(n = 10),
                     "!## This Columns is so special€€€" = runif(n = 10),
                    check.names = FALSE)

I'm doing some cleaning on this data using dplyr and I would like to change column names to syntatically correct ones and remove the punctuation as a second step. What I tried so far:

dta_cln <- dta %>% 
    rename(make.names(names(dta)))

generates an error:

> dta_clean <- dta %>% 
+     rename(make.names(names(dta)))
Error: All arguments to rename must be named.

Desired result

What I wan to achieve can be done in base:

names(dta) <- gsub("[[:punct:]]","",make.names(names(dta)))

which would return:

> names(dta)
[1] "ThisisColumnOne"          "AnotheramazingColumnname" "XThisColumnsissospecial"

I want to achieve the same effect but using dyplr and %>%.

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, and I'm sure you found the solution by now, but I stumbled here searching for the same question, and ultimately found a few new ways to do this.

Dplyr

Using dplyr 0.6.0 and above, there is now a rename_all function:

  dta %>% 
    rename_all(funs(gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", make.names(names(dta)))))

Which works, but it's a little messy to me. If you want more flexibility with dplyr, you can also call on:

• rename_at
• rename_if

Janitor

This is a pretty nice package (with plenty of additional utility) that can easily clean up column names:

library(janitor)

dta %>% 
  clean_names()

Which will rename and clean all column names to the following:

[1] "this_is_column_one"  "another_amazing_column_name"  "x_this_columns_is_so_special"

Everything becomes snake_case rather than CamelCase, but overall clean_names is very flexible in the column names it handles. If that IS a deal breaker, you can use yet another package snakecase for its function to_big_camel_case() within the rename_all function...although that is starting to get a little too esoteric