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

If you use read.csv() to import your data (which replaces all spaces " " with ".") you can replace these instead with an underscore "_" using:

names(df) <- gsub("\\.", "_", names(df))