what is the difference between names and colnames

Question

I just want to understand if there is a difference between names and colnames when working with data.frame. Both seems to behave the s

Answer 1

If you look at the beginning of the colnames and colnames<- functions source code :

R> colnames
function (x, do.NULL = TRUE, prefix = "col") 
{
    if (is.data.frame(x) && do.NULL) 
        return(names(x))
(...)


R> `colnames<-`
function (x, value) 
{
    if (is.data.frame(x)) {
        names(x) <- value
    }
(...)

You can see that for data frames, colnames just call the names function. So yes, they are strictly equivalent.