How to rename selected columns using dplyr with new column names as strings

Question

I have the following tibble:

library(tidyverse)
df <- structure(list(Sepal.Length = c(5.1, 4.9, 4.7, 4.6, 5), Sepal.Width = c(3.5, 
3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.6), Pet         


        

Answer 1

I'm a little late to the party on this, but after staring at the programming vignette for a long time, I found the relevant example in the Different input and output variable .

In my simpler use case, I just needed to rename a column to the value of a string:

> df1 = data_frame(index = 1:5, value = c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50))
> df1
# A tibble: 5 x 2
  index value
   
1     1    10
2     2    20
3     3    30
4     4    40
5     5    50

> newname = 'blau'
> newname2 = 'wheee'

> df1 %>% rename(!!newname := value, !!newname2 := index)
# A tibble: 5 x 2
  wheee  blau
   
1     1    10
2     2    20
3     3    30
4     4    40
5     5    50

So if you're happy to do that manually, you can just:

df %>%
  rename(!!paste("Sepal.Length", "xxx", sep = ".") := Sepal.Length)

If, however, you need something that automatically appends ".xxx" to whatever column name is supplied to it, I recommend you have a close look at that section. It's still a bit over my head, unfortunately, but I can see that it's doable >_>