ggplot2 aes_string() fails to handle names starting with numbers or containing spaces

Question

If the column names of a data.frame are started with numbers, or have spaces, aes_string() fails to handle them:

foo=data.frame(\"1         


        

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, this method should work programmatically:

foo=data.frame("1st Col"=1:5, "2nd Col"=5:1, check.names=F)

#Save the colnames
bar=colnames(foo)

#change the names to something usable
names(foo) <- c("col1", "col2")

#Plot with arbitrary labs
ggplot(foo, aes(x=col1, y=col2)) + geom_point()+
  labs(x=bar[1], y=bar[2])