Replacement for “rename” in dplyr

Question

I like plyr\'s renaming function rename. I have recently started using dplyr, and was wondering if there is an easy way to rename variables using a function fr

Answer 1

You can actually use plyr's rename function as part of dplyr chains. I think every function that a) takes a data.frame as the first argument and b) returns a data.frame works for chaining. Here is an example:

library('plyr')
library('dplyr')

DF = data.frame(var=1:5)

DF %>%
    # `rename` from `plyr`
    rename(c('var'='x')) %>%
    # `mutate` from `dplyr` (note order in which libraries are loaded)
    mutate(x.sq=x^2)

#   x x.sq
# 1 1    1
# 2 2    4
# 3 3    9
# 4 4   16
# 5 5   25

UPDATE: The current version of dplyr supports renaming directly as part of the select function (see Romain Francois post above). The general statement about using non-dplyr functions as part of dplyr chains is still valid though and rename is an interesting example.