How do I replace multiple column names with substring

Question

I want to edit multiple column names with the substring(). Only the code I wrote isn't working.

Weirdly enough the following code works. Old column names:

oldColNames <- names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)])

results in:

> names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)])
[1] "2000 [YR2000]" "2001 [YR2001]" "2002 [YR2002]" "2003 [YR2003]" "2004 [YR2004]" "2005 [YR2005]" "2006 [YR2006]"
[8] "2007 [YR2007]" "2008 [YR2008]" "2009 [YR2009]" "2010 [YR2010]" "2011 [YR2011]" "2012 [YR2012]" "2013 [YR2013]"
[15] "2014 [YR2014]" "2015 [YR2015]"

And the new column names:

newColNames <- substring(names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)]), 1, 4)
oldColNames <- newColNames

Results in what I excually want:

> oldColNames
[1] "2000" "2001" "2002" "2003" "2004" "2005" "2006" "2007" "2008" "2009" "2010" "2011" "2012" "2013" "2014" "2015"

Of course, I want to change the column names in my dataframe so initially, I wrote the following code but the colnames didn't change.

names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)]) <- substring(names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)]), 1, 4)

> names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)])
[1] "2000 [YR2000]" "2001 [YR2001]" "2002 [YR2002]" "2003 [YR2003]" "2004 [YR2004]" "2005 [YR2005]" "2006 [YR2006]"
[8] "2007 [YR2007]" "2008 [YR2008]" "2009 [YR2009]" "2010 [YR2010]" "2011 [YR2011]" "2012 [YR2012]" "2013 [YR2013]"
[15] "2014 [YR2014]" "2015 [YR2015]"

drmariod · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-15 11:55:12Z

1

Test this

names(forcesdf)[5:20] <- substring(names(forcesdf[,c(5:20)]), 1, 4)

answered Aug 15, 2017 at 11:55

drmariod

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Comments

TLaguna · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-15 11:56:07Z

0

You can change them if you do:

names(forcesdf)[5:20] <- substring(names(forcesdf)[5:20], 1, 4)

I think the key is that in your code you are subsetting the column names but not referencing to them.

answered Aug 15, 2017 at 11:56

TLaguna

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