Renaming a variable with rename():

Renaming a variable in a data frame in R is surprisingly hard to do! The rename() function is designed to make this process easier.

For the examples in this section we will be using a built-in data set in R called trees data set. First load the data set using data(“trees”) command. To the help file for trees just type ?trees. Don’t forget to load the dplyr package.

library(dplyr)
library(datasets)
#OR
data("trees")

?trees

You can see some basic characteristics of the dataset with the dim() and str() functions.

dim(trees)
str(trees)
names(trees)

Output:

> dim(trees)
[1] 31 3
> str(trees)
'data.frame': 31 obs. of 3 variables:
$ Girth : num 8.3 8.6 8.8 10.5 10.7 10.8 11 11 11.1 11.2 ...
$ Height: num 70 65 63 72 81 83 66 75 80 75 ...
$ Volume: num 10.3 10.3 10.2 16.4 18.8 19.7 15.6 18.2 22.6 19.9 ...
> names(trees)
[1] "Girth" "Height" "Volume"

Example:

mydata <- rename(trees, "Tree Diameter in Inches"=Girth, "Height in ft"=Height, "Volume of Timber"=Volume)
head(mydata)

Output:

  Tree Diameter in Inches Height in ft Volume of Timber
1 8.3 70 10.3
2 8.6 65 10.3
3 8.8 63 10.2
4 10.5 72 16.4
5 10.7 81 18.8
6 10.8 83 19.7