How to add header to a dataset in R?

Question

I need to read the ''wdbc.data' in the following data folder: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/breast-cancer-wisconsin/

Doing this in R is easy using command read.csv but as the header is missing how can I add it? I have the information but don't know how to do this and I'd prefer do not edit the data file.

Answer 1

You can do the following:

Load the data:

test <- read.csv(
          "http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/breast-cancer-wisconsin/breast-cancer-wisconsin.data",
          header=FALSE)

Note that the default value of the header argument for read.csv is TRUE so in order to get all lines you need to set it to FALSE.

Add names to the different columns in the data.frame

names(test) <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")

or alternative and faster as I understand (not reloading the entire dataset):

colnames(test) <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")

Answer 2

You can also use colnames instead of names if you have data.frame or matrix

Answer 3

You can also solve this problem by creating an array of values and assigning that array:

newheaders <- c("a", "b", "c", ... "x")
colnames(data) <- newheaders