Data Science Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Rename Variables

20201202 We can rename variables within a pipeline. To normalise the variables automatically see Section 9.13. If we have a set of new names that we want to use instead of the original names or instead of the automatically normalised names, then use dplyr::rename() in a pipeline.

The original variable names are obtained using base::names():

names(ds)

##  [1] "Date"          "Location"      "MinTemp"       "MaxTemp"      
##  [5] "Rainfall"      "Evaporation"   "Sunshine"      "WindGustDir"  
##  [9] "WindGustSpeed" "WindDir9am"    "WindDir3pm"    "WindSpeed9am" 
## [13] "WindSpeed3pm"  "Humidity9am"   "Humidity3pm"   "Pressure9am"  
## [17] "Pressure3pm"   "Cloud9am"      "Cloud3pm"      "Temp9am"      
## [21] "Temp3pm"       "RainToday"     "RISK_MM"       "RainTomorrow"

We can rename the variables based on their name using dplyr::rename():

# Rename the variables based on their names.

ds %>%
  rename(date=Date, location=Location, min_temp=MinTemp, max_temp=MaxTemp)

## # A tibble: 176,747 x 24
##    date       location min_temp max_temp Rainfall Evaporation Sunshine
##    <date>     <chr>       <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>       <dbl>    <dbl>
##  1 2008-12-01 Albury       13.4     22.9      0.6          NA       NA
##  2 2008-12-02 Albury        7.4     25.1      0            NA       NA
##  3 2008-12-03 Albury       12.9     25.7      0            NA       NA
....