How to Rename Variables within Columns in R?

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If you need to change the text of a specific column while analyzing data in R, I will introduce how to do it. First, let’s create a simple dataset

Name=c("JACK","KATE","BOB","DAVID","MIN")
Nation=c("USA","Spain","France","Germany","Korea")
Sex=c("Male","Female","Male","Male","Male")
Table=data.frame (Name, Nation, Sex)
Table

   Name    Nation    Sex
1  JACK    USA       Male
2  KATE    Spain     Female
3   BOB    France    Male
4 DAVID    Germany   Male
5   MIN    Korea     Male

First, let’s rename the column names. We will change the ‘Nation’ column name to ‘Country’ and the ‘Sex’ column name to ‘Gender’. If you enter the following code, the column names will be updated accordingly.

colnames(Table)[2]=c("Country")
colnames(Table)[3]=c("Gender")
Table

   Name   <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Country</mark>   <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Gender</mark>
1  JACK   USA       Male
2  KATE   Spain     Female
3  BOB    France    Male
4  DAVID  Germany   Male
5  MIN    Korea     Male

If the nationality of DAVID is Canada instead of Germany, you can update by entering the following code:

Table$Country[Table$Country=="Germany"]="Canada"
Table
   Name   Country   Gender
1  JACK   USA       Male
2  KATE   Spain     Female
3  BOB    France    Male
4  DAVID  <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Canada</mark>    Male
5  MIN    Korea     Male

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stringr package

Next, I will introduce how to change variable names using the stringr package. Before we proceed, we need to install the package first.

if(!require(stringr)) install.packages("stringr")
library (stringr)

To change variable names using this package, we can use the str_replace_all function. For example, let’s say we want to replace ‘USA’ with ‘United States’ and ‘KATE’ with ‘Catherine’ in our dataset.

Name=c("JACK","KATE","BOB","DAVID","MIN")
Nation=c("USA","Spain","France","Germany","Korea")
Sex=c("Male","Female","Male","Male","Male")
Table=data.frame (Name, Nation, Sex)
Table

   Name    Nation    Sex
1  JACK    USA       Male
2  KATE    Spain     Female
3  BOB     France    Male
4  DAVID   Germany   Male
5  MIN     Korea     Male

Table$Nation= str_replace_all (Table$Nation, 'USA', 'United States')
Table$Name= str_replace_all (Table$Name, 'KATE', 'Catherine')
Table

   Name       Nation         Sex
1  JACK       <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">United States</mark>  Male
2  <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Catherine</mark>  Spain          Female
3  BOB        France         Male
4  DAVID      Germany        Male
5  MIN        Korea          Male

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