Maintain Original Column Names with XLConnect readWorksheet in R

Question

I am reading in the column header from a .xlsx file using XLConnect::readWorksheet . The issue is that the column header contains / and spaces between words, which are replaced with . by the package when loading.

For example, an Excel spreadsheet with header First Name and Sex/Gender will appear in R as First.Name and Sex.Gender .

This is a problem, because I don't know if . represents a / or a space .

Is there a way to override this feature and simulate data.table functionality where column names are maintained and wrapped in a ` (backtick)?

Answer 1

There is an argument of check.names, with a default value of TRUE, if you change it to FALSE, then the column names will be maintained.

XLConnect::readWorksheet(loadWorkbook("C:/Book1.xlsx"), sheet = 1, check.names = FALSE)

You may also want to use the readxl packages as in the example:

readxl::read_excel("C:/Book1.xlsx")

This doesn't have an option for check.names or similar, but the default behavior does not change the column names.