How to replace the “.” in column names generated by read.csv() with a single space when exporting?

Question

I am using R to do some data pre-processing, and here is the problem that I am faced with: I input the data using read.csv(filename,header=TRUE), and then the s

Answer 1

To get spaces back in the names, do this (right before you export - R does let you have spaces in variable names, but it's a pain):

# A simple regular expression to replace dots with spaces
# This might have unintended consequences, so be sure to check the results
names(yourdata) <- gsub(x = names(yourdata),
                        pattern = "\\.",
                        replacement = " ")

To drop the first-column index, just add row.names = FALSE to your write.xlsx(). That's a common argument for functions that write out data in tabular format (write.csv() has it, too).