Change Rows Into Column Names Using R-CodePudding

I'm trying to make column names from the rows with date. Take the following dataset, for instance:

# create data frame
df <- data.frame(student=c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'),
                scores=c('May, 30', 2022, 31, 39, 35))
# glimpse data
df   

  student  scores
1       A May, 30
2       B    2022
3       C      31
4       D      39
5       E      35

I want to change the rows 1 and 2 from score column and changed them into month_year format and then remove the entire rows. I'm trying the following script to get the column names but getting bizarre results:

colnames(df) <- df[2,]
df <- df[-2,]

Desired Output

  student  may_2022
1       C      31
2       D      39
3       E      35

What would be the ideal way of getting the desired output? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

CodePudding user response：

If this is the way your data are truly imported, as a generalizable approach you could try getting the month from the first row using sub and then pasting with the year from the second row.

names(df)[2] <- paste0(sub("[^[:alpha:]] ", "", df$scores[1]), "_",df$scores[2])
df <- df[-c(1:2),]

Output:

#   student May_2022
# 3       C       31
# 4       D       39
# 5       E       35