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

There is an easy way to remove spaces in column names in data.table. You will have to convert your data frame to data table.

setnames(x=DT, old=names(DT), new=gsub(" ","",names(DT)))

Country Code will be converted to CountryCode