[R] Blank spaces are replaced by period in read.csv, I want to replace blacks with an underline

[Sarah Goslee]

I've taken the liberty of copying this back to the list, so that others can
participate in or benefit from the discussion.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 10:49 AM, John Sorkin <jsorkin at grecc.umaryland.edu>
wrote:

> Sarah,
> I am not sure how I use check.names to replace every space in the names of
> my variables with an underline. Can you show me how to do this? My current
> code is as follows:
>

check.names just tells R not to reformat your column names. If they aren't
already what you want, you'll need to do something else.


> data <- read.csv("C:\\Users\\john\\Dropbox
> (Personal)\\HanlonMatt\\fullgenus3.csv")
>
> The problem I has is that my column names are not unique, e.g., I have
> multiple columns whose column names are (in CSV format):
> X Y, X Y, X Y, X Y
> R reads the names as follows:
> X.Y, X.Y.1, X.Y.2, X.Y.3
> I need to have the names look like:
> X_Y, X_Y.1, X_Y.2, X_Y.3
>

You've been saying that you want to replace every space with an underscore,
but that's not what your example shows. Instead, you want to let R import
the names and add the identifying number (though if you do it yourself you
can get the number to match the column number, which is neater), then
change the FIRST underscore to a period.

I'd import them with check.names=FALSE, then modify them explicitly:


> mynames <- c("x y", "x y", "x y", "x y")
> mynames
[1] "x y" "x y" "x y" "x y"
> mynames <- sub(" ", ".", mynames)
> mynames
[1] "x.y" "x.y" "x.y" "x.y"
> mynames <- paste(mynames, seq_along(mynames), sep="_")
> mynames
[1] "x.y_1" "x.y_2" "x.y_3" "x.y_4"


You could also let R modify them, then use sub() to change the first
underscore to a period and leave the rest alone.

Sarah

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