Rename columns of a data frame by searching column name

Question

I am writing a wrapper to ggplot to produce multiple graphs based on various datasets. As I am passing the column names to the function, I need to rename the column names so tha

Answer 1

hmm, this might be way to complicated, but the first that come into my mind:

lookup <- data.frame(search = c(col3_search,col2_search,col1_search),
                     replace = c(col3_replace,col2_replace,col1_replace))

colnames(df) <- lookup$replace[match(lookup$search, colnames(df))]