How do I change the names of the first few columns and leave the remaining as they were if they are-CodePudding

For example I have a dataframe that looks like this

ID| first name| last name| DOB
 1       John      Smith   1/4/1999
 2       Fred   Johnson    1/2/1987

I have a vector that is

c("Identification","First","Last")

I then do

names(df2)<-Vector[1:3]

Which then gives me almost what I want but not exact.

 Identification|First|Last|
 1              John  Smith      1/4/1999
 2               Fred Johnson    1/2/1987

I would like the DOB to not go missing

     Identification|First|Last|DOB
 1              John  Smith      1/4/1999
 2               Fred Johnson    1/2/1987

Is there a way to do this dynamically. Nothing where you decide to add DOB at the end. I want a script that would just change the first three columns based on the selection and leave the remaining columns as their name is and not turn them into blank.

CodePudding user response：

You can use

names(df2)[1:3] <- Vector

If you wanted to change the first element of x to 5, you'd use x[1] <- 5. If you wanted to change the first couple elements of x to 5, 7, you'd use x[1:2] <- c(5, 7). Assignments to names(df) work the same.

CodePudding user response：

colnames(df2) = c(Vector,colnames(df2)[4])

Where 4 is the index of the column that you want to preserve the name.

CodePudding user response：

In the case that you have more than 4 names, you can dynamically rename them:

vector <- c("Identification","First","Last")

names(df) <- c(vector, names(df)[(length(vector) 1):ncol(df)])

Data

df <- data.frame(ID = c(1,2),
                 "first name" = c("John", "Fred"),
                 "last name" = c("Smith", "Johnson"),
                 DOB = c("1/4/1999", "1/2/1987"))