[S] Summary - changing a variable name (Thanks again)

["Barker, Chris {GL P~Palo Alto}" <CHRIS.BARKER@roche.com>]

Here is  a summary of the replies I've received. Again thanks very much.
(Apologies to those whose suggestions I didn't include here, I didn't
want to take up to much bandwidth.)

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>From Brian Ripley

names(df)[match("old", names(df)] <- "new"

You need the quotes, but "old" and "new" could be character vectors.
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>From Doug Bates

Suppose your dataframe is called myfrm and you want to change the name
of the "foo" column to "bar".  It could look like

 frmNames <- names( myfrm )
 frmNames[ match( "foo", frmNames ) ] <- "bar"
 names( myfrm ) <- frmNames
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>From Bill Dunlap 
change.column.name <- function(data.frame, old.name, new.name) {
        i <- match(old.name, names(data.frame))
        if (any(is.na(i)))
                stop(paste("(some of)", old.name, "not in data.frame"))
        names(data.frame)[i] <- new.name
        data.frame
}
> x<-data.frame(One=1:3,Two=4:6)
> x <- change.column.name(x, "One", "Alpha")
> x
  Alpha Two 
1     1   4
2     2   5
3     3   6
> x <- change.column.name(x, c("Two","Alpha"), c("II", "I"))
> x
  I II 
1 1  4
2 2  5
3 3  6
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>From John VanderPloeg

# variable names before changing them
> names(dec)
[1]  "DEC1" "DEC2"  "count"

#function
> change.varname
function(data.f, var.name, newvar.name)
{
        names(data.f)[names(data.f) == var.name] <- newvar.name
        data.f
}

#call function changing DEC2 to DEC3
> dec<-change.varname(dec,"DEC2","DEC3")

#new variable names
> names(dec)
[1]   "DEC" "DEC3"   "count"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Chris Barker
Principal Pharmacoeconomic Statistician
Roche Pharma Business - Palo Alto
(650)-852-3152

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