dplyr rename not working with regular expression

Question

The select function works fine when I try to rename variables according to certain conditions

require(dplyr)
select(iris, petal = starts_with("Petal"))

However when I try to keep all the other variables using

rename(iris, petal = starts_with("Petal"))

Error: Arguments to rename must be unquoted variable names. Arguments petal are not.

I have no idea why dplyr complains about this. If this behavior is intended, what is the right way to rename variables using starts_with (or contains) while keeping other variables there?

Answer 1

select is already renaming them for you. You can add everything() to the call in order to get the rest of the columns

select(iris, petal = starts_with("Petal"), everything())
#     petal1 petal2 Sepal.Length Sepal.Width    Species
# 1      1.4    0.2          5.1         3.5     setosa
# 2      1.4    0.2          4.9         3.0     setosa
# 3      1.3    0.2          4.7         3.2     setosa
# 4      1.5    0.2          4.6         3.1     setosa
# 5      1.4    0.2          5.0         3.6     setosa
# 6      1.7    0.4          5.4         3.9     setosa
# 7      1.4    0.3          4.6         3.4     setosa
# 8      1.5    0.2          5.0         3.4     setosa
# 9      1.4    0.2          4.4         2.9     setosa
...