dplyr 'rename' standard evaluation function not working as expected?

Question

UPDATE: From comment below on this post, this is now working as expected, without the issues I laid out here.

Below is a toy example of using rename_ fr

Answer 1

There are a few thing that make this painful:

1. c(x = "new") is the same as c("x" = "new"), and not the opposite of c(new = x).

2. You can construct the vector you want with setNames(x, "new"), but...

3. I forgot to add the .dots argument to rename_ (bug report at https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/708) so you can't do:

   rename_(dat, .dots = setNames(x, "new"))
   

   Instead you need to use do.call:

   do.call(rename_, c(list(quote(dat)), list(setNames(x, "new"))))
   

Answer 2

In my Rstudio, I define:

x <- 'myname'
dat <- data.frame(yes=1, no=2)

I want to change the variable name from yes to myname

It doesn't work:

rename_(dat, .dots = setNames(x, "yes"))

But this works:

rename_(dat, .dots = setNames("yes", x))

rename_(dat, .dots = setNames("yes", paste(x) ))