r Remove parts of column name after certain characters

Question

I have a large data set with thousands of columns. The column names include various unwanted characters as follows:

col1_3x_xxx
col2_3y_xyz
col3_3z_zyx
         


        

Answer 1

certainly late for this answer, but just in case someone is looking for a solution

colnames(df1)[col] <-  sub("_3.*", "", colnames(df1)[col])

And if you have multiple columns :

for ( col in 1:ncol(df1)){
    colnames(df1)[col] <-  sub("_3.*", "", colnames(df1)[col])
}