How to fix spaces in column names of a data.frame (remove spaces, inject dots)?

Question

After importing a file, I always try try to remove spaces from the column names to make referral to column names easier.

Is there a better way to do this other then

Answer 1

Assign the names like this. This works best. It replaces all white spaces in the name with underscore.

names(ctm2)<-gsub("\\s","_",names(ctm2))