setNames equivalent for colnames and rownames for use in pipe

Question

I often use R's setNames function in a magrittr pipeline or elsewhere to fix the names of an object on the fly:

library(magrittr)
mytable %>% setNames(c("col1", "col2", "col3")) %>% ...[more analysis]

Are there equivalent functions for colnames and rownames? Something like setColnames?

Answer 1

It’s not pretty, but the following works:

mytable %>% `colnames<-`(c("col1", "col2", "col3")) %>% ...[more analysis]

This uses the fact that an assignment of the form colnames(x) <- foo is actually calling a function `colnames<-`(x, foo). The backticks around the name are necessary since colnames<- is not ordinarily a valid identifier in R (but between backticks it is).

So you don’t need any aliases.

Answer 2

magrittr provides several "aliases" (see ??Aliases), including set_colnames (equivalent to `colnames<-`) and set_rownames (equivalent to `rownames<-`).