Set column names for every element in a list based on another list-CodePudding

Suppose I have a list of two dataframes.

Name1 <- c("Jon", "Bill", "Maria")
Age1 <- c(23, 41, 32)

df1 <- data.frame(Name1, Age1)

Name2 <- c("Sally", "Tom")
Age2 <- c(25, 32)
Height <- c(56, 55)

df2 <- data.frame(Name2, Age2, Height) 

list1 <- list(df1, df2)

list1
[[1]]
Name1 Age1
1   Jon   23
2  Bill   41
3 Maria   32

[[2]]
Name2 Age2 Height
1 Sally   25     56
2   Tom   32     55

I also have another list for the column names, that differ with each dataframe as they have inconsistent column numbers.

list2 <- list( c("Names", "Age"), c("Names", "Age", "Height"))

list2
[[1]]
[1] "Names" "Age"  

[[2]]
[1] "Names"  "Age"    "Height"

How can I assign the values in list2 as the column names for list1?

CodePudding user response：

You can do it with a simple for loop that iterates along both lists simultaneously:

for (i in seq_along(list1)){
  colnames(list1[[i]]) <- list2[[i]]
}

# [[1]]
#   Names Age
# 1   Jon  23
# 2  Bill  41
# 3 Maria  32
# 
# [[2]]
#   Names Age Height
# 1 Sally  25     56
# 2   Tom  32     55

If you had the same number of columns in each df and a vector of names, then use lapply to make it even simpler:

lapply(list1, setNames, list2)

See Changing Column Names in a List of Data Frames in R for more info.