renaming the output column with the plyr package in R

Question

Hadley turned me on to the plyr package and I find myself using it all the time to do 'group by' sort of stuff. But I find myself having to always rename the resulting columns since they default to V1, V2, etc.

Here's an example:

mydata<-data.frame(matrix(rnorm(144, mean=2, sd=2),72,2),c(rep("A",24),rep("B",24),rep("C",24)))
colnames(mydata) <- c("x_value", "acres",  "state")
groupAcres <- ddply(mydata, c("state"), function(df)c(sum(df$acres)))
colnames(groupAcres) <- c("state","stateAcres")

Is there a way to make ddply name the resulting column for me so I can omit that last line?

Answer 1

This seems to work:

> groupAcres <- ddply(mydata, c("state"), function(df) c(myName=sum(df$acres)))
> groupAcres
  state   myName
1     A 56.87973
2     B 57.84451
3     C 52.82415

Answer 2

Use summarise (or summarize):

  groupAcres <- ddply(mydata, "state", summarise, 
     myName = sum(acres))