On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 12:08 PM, hadley wickham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Chip Barnaby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Yes, someone else pointed out my typo, sorry. > > > > My issue here is that referring to columns by index is risky. Hard-coded > > indices will be buried in code and there will be trouble if (when) the data > > organization changes. So I am trying to learn how to work with names, but > > the language does not seem to allow that approach without some awkwardness. > > I guess I could write some helper functions. > > There's the rename function in the reshape package: > > library(reshape) > X <- rename(X, c("bob" = "sue")
Or if you just want the function: rename <- function (x, replace) { replacement <- replace[names(x)] names(x)[!is.na(replacement)] <- replacement[!is.na(replacement)] x } Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.