How to fix spaces in column names of a data.frame (remove spaces, inject dots)?

Question

After importing a file, I always try try to remove spaces from the column names to make referral to column names easier.

Is there a better way to do this other then using transform and then removing the extra column this command creates?

This is what I use now:

names(ctm2) #tranform function does this, but requires some action ctm2<-transform(ctm2,dymmyvar=1) #remove dummy column ctm2$dymmyvar <- NULL names(ctm2) 

Answer 1

There exists more elegant and general solution for that purpose:

tidy.name.vector <- make.names(name.vector, unique=TRUE) 

make.names() makes syntactically valid names out of character vectors. A syntactically valid name consists of letters, numbers and the dot or underline characters and starts with a letter or the dot not followed by a number.

Additionally, flag unique=TRUE allows you to avoid possible dublicates in new column names.

As code to implement

d<-read_delim(urltxt,delim='\t',) names(d)<-make.names(names(d),unique = TRUE) 

Answer 2

There is a very useful package for that, called janitor that makes cleaning up column names very simple. It removes all unique characters and replaces spaces with _.

library(janitor)  #can be done by simply ctm2 <- clean_names(ctm2)  #or piping through `dplyr` ctm2 <- ctm2 %>%         clean_names()