How do you delete the header in a dataframe?

Question

I want to delete the header from a dataframe that I have. I read in the data from a csv file then I transposed it, but it created a new header that is the name of the file and the row that the data is from in the file.

Here's an example for a dataframe df:

     a.csv.1   a.csv.2   a.csv.3   ...
  x        5         6         1   ...
  y        2         3         2   ...  

I want to delete the a.csv.n row, but when I try df <- df[-1,] it deletes row x and not the top.

Answer 1

You can use names(df) to change the names of header or col names. If newnames is a list of names as newname<-list("col1","col2","col3"), then names(df)<-newname will give you a data with col names as col1 col2 col3.

As @ Henrik said, the col names should be non-empty. Setting the names(df)<-NULLwill give NA in col names.

If your data is csv file and if you use header=TRUE to read the data in R then the data will have same colnames as csv file, but if you set the header=FALSE, R will assign the colnames as V1,V2,...and your colnames in the original csv file appear as a first row.

anydata.csv  
      a b c  d
    1 1 2 3 13
    2 2 3 1 21

read.csv("anydata.csv",header=TRUE)
      a b c  d
    1 1 2 3 13
    2 2 3 1 21

read.csv("anydata.csv",header=FALSE)

  V1 V2 V3 V4
1  a  b  c  d
2  1  2  3 13
3  2  3  1 21

Answer 2

It comes with some years of delay but you can simply use a vector renaming de columns:

## if you want to delete all column names:
colnames(df)[] <- ""

## if you want to delete let's say column 1:
colnames(df)[1] <- ""

## if you want to delete 1 to 3 and 7:
colnames(df)[c(1:3,7)] <- ""