Renaming multiple similar column names

Question

I have a data frame that has columns ranging from start_1 to start_32. I'd like to rename all of them to m1 to m32. So far I have done this using the following code:

df %>%
  rename(m1 = start_1,
         m2 = start_2,
         ...
         m32 = start_32)

I may need to do this a few more times for other variables and I am looking for more condensed way of achieving the same goal. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use names :

names(df) <- gsub("^start_", "m", names(df))

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or, in dplyr , with rename_with :

library(dplyr)
rename_with(df, ~ gsub("start_", "m", .x), starts_with("start_"))
rename_with(df, ~ gsub("^start_", "m", .x))