Change column name by looking up

Question

I know that I can change a data.frame column name by:

colnames(df)[3] <- "newname"

But there might be cases where the column I want to change is not in the 3rd position. Is there a way to look up the column by name and change it? Like this...

colnames(df)[,"oldname"] <- "newname"

BTW, I have tried this code and I keep getting incorrect number of subscripts on matrix.

Thanks.

Answer 1

colnames(df)[colnames(df)=="oldname"] <- "newname"

or just names

names(df)[names(df)=="oldname"] <- "newname"

There are various functions for renaming columns in packages as well.