Replacement for "rename" in dplyr?

Question

I like plyr's renaming function `rename`. I have recently started using dplyr, and was wondering if there is an easy way to rename variables using a function from dplyr, that is as easy to use as to plyr's `rename`?

Answer 1

Yes, in dplyr there is also a rename() function. It works a bit different. So say you have a data.frame,

numbers <- 1:4

letters <- factor(c("a", "b", "c", "d"))

df <- data.frame(numbers, letters)

you can use the dplyr function to rename the variable names by,

library(dplyr)

df <- rename(df, "numbers2" = number, "letters2" = letter)

The new name is in quotes and the previous name is not in quotes.

Hope this helped! :)