Dplyr: Rename multiple variables with regex by name-CodePudding

I need to rename multiple variables using a replacement dataframe. This replacement dataframe also includes regex. I would like to use a similar solution proposed here, .e.g

df %>% rename_with(~ newnames, all_of(oldnames))

MWE:

df <- mtcars[, 1:5]

# works without regex 
replace_df_1 <- tibble::tibble(
  old = df %>% colnames(),
  new = df %>% colnames() %>% toupper()
) 

df %>% rename_with(~ replace_df_1$new, all_of(replace_df_1$old))


# with regex

replace_df_2 <- tibble::tibble(
  old = c("^m", "cyl101|cyl", "disp", "hp", "drat"),
  new = df %>% colnames() %>% toupper()
)

  old        new  
  <chr>      <chr>
1 ^m         MPG  
2 cyl101|cyl CYL  
3 disp       DISP 
4 hp         HP   
5 drat       DRAT 

# does not work
df %>% rename_with(~ replace_df_2$new, all_of(replace_df_2$old))
df %>% rename_with(~ matches(replace_df_2$new), all_of(replace_df_2$old))

EDIT 1:

The solution of @Mael works in general, but there seems to be index issue, e.g. consider the following example

replace_df_2 <- tibble::tibble(
  old = c("xxxx", "cyl101|cyl", "yyy", "xxx", "yyy"),
  new = mtcars[,1:5] %>% colnames() %>% toupper()
)


mtcars[, 1:5] %>% 
  rename_with(~ replace_df_2$new, matches(replace_df_2$old))

Results in

 mpg   MPG  disp    hp  drat
   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
 1  21       6  160    110  3.9

meaning that the rename_with function correctly finds the column, but replaces it with the first item in the replacement column.

Thank you for any hints!

CodePudding user response：

matches should be on the regex-y column:

df %>% 
  rename_with(~ replace_df_2$new, matches(replace_df_2$old))

                     MPG CYL  DISP  HP DRAT
Mazda RX4           21.0   6 160.0 110 3.90
Mazda RX4 Wag       21.0   6 160.0 110 3.90
Datsun 710          22.8   4 108.0  93 3.85
Hornet 4 Drive      21.4   6 258.0 110 3.08
Hornet Sportabout   18.7   8 360.0 175 3.15
Valiant             18.1   6 225.0 105 2.76
#...

CodePudding user response：

If the task is simply to set all col names to upper-case, then this works:

sub("^(. )$", "\\U\\1", colnames(df), perl = TRUE)
[1] "MPG"  "CYL"  "DISP" "HP"   "DRAT"

In dplyr:

df %>%
  rename_with( ~sub("^(. )$", "\\U\\1", colnames(df), perl = TRUE))