I have example data as follows:

# list of data frames:
l = list(a=mtcars, b=mtcars, c=mtcars)

I would like to replace the list names, if they exist in the vector list_names_available_for_name_change with new_list_names.

list_names_available_for_name_change <- c("a", "c")
new_list_names <- c("android", "circus")

I thought of doing something like:

names(l)[names(l) == "a"] <- "android"

But I would like to do this for the entire list. Something like:

names(l)[names(l) == list_names_available_for_name_change ] <- new_list_names 

How should I write the syntax to achieve this?

Desired output:

# list of data frames:
l = list(android=mtcars, b=mtcars, circus=mtcars)

CodePudding user response：

In base R, use match to find the matching positions of the 'names' of the list with the subsset of list names, use that to get the corresponding 'new_list_names' and do the assign on the names of the list

nm1 <- new_list_names[match(names(l), list_names_available_for_name_change)]
i1 <- !is.na(nm1)
names(l)[i1] <- nm1[i1]

-output

 names(l)
[1] "android" "b"       "circus" 

Or with mapvalues

names(l) <-  plyr::mapvalues(names(l),
    list_names_available_for_name_change, new_list_names)