Change selected elements of character vector

Question

Is there a shorter version for the folowing principle to rename certain columns of a data frame?

data1<-data.frame(\"a\"=1:3,\"b\"=1:3,\"c\"=1:3)

data1Names&         


        

Answer 1

Use match to replace selected elements and to respect the order when using names<-...

names(data1)[ match( c("a", "c") , names(data1) ) ] <- c("hello", "world")
#  hello b world
#1     1 1     1
#2     2 2     2
#3     3 3     3

Swapping the desired order of renaming...

names(data1)[ match( c("c", "a") , names(data1) ) ] <- c("hello", "world")
#  world b hello
#1     1 1     1
#2     2 2     2
#3     3 3     3