Specifying column names in a data.frame changes spaces to “.”

Question

Let\'s say I have a data.frame, like so:

x <- c(1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10)
df <- data.frame(\"Label 1\"=x,\"Label 2\"=rnorm(10         


        

Answer 1

You can change an existing data frames names to contain spaces ie using your example

x <- c(1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10,1:10)
df <- data.frame("Label 1"=x,"Label 2"=rnorm(100))
colnames(df) <- c("Label 1", "Label 2")
head(df, 3)

returns

  Label 1    Label 2
1       1  0.2013347
2       2  1.8823111
3       3 -0.5233811

and you can still access the columns using the $ operator, you just need to use double quotes eg

df$"Label 2"[1:3]

returns

[1]  0.2013347  1.8823111 -0.5233811

It seems rather inconsistent to me to auto-convert column names upon data.frame creation, but not to-do the same during column name alteration, but thats how R works at the moment.