Thank you so much this is the only thing that has worked for me

This might help you…Kan has nicely described this..
https://blog.exploratory.io/selecting-columns-809bdd1ef615

df %>%
select(-starts_with(“user.”), -starts_with(“milestone.”),
-starts_with(“pull_”), -ends_with(“url”)) %>%
rename(developer = assignee.login) %>%
select(-starts_with(“assignee”), -title, -comments, -locked, -labels, -id, -body)

You are goooood!

Kassambara – you are a hero. Thanks a million for your extremely detailed answer. I was hoping for some hints and get a full code – much appreciated.
/T

Hi Thomas,

you need to perform some string manipulations as shown below.

library(tidyverse)
library(stringr) 

# Demo data peparation
iris <- as_tibble(iris)
colnames(iris) <- c("alt1.price", "alt2.price", "alt2.pol", "alt2.x", "y")
iris

# Helper function to rename columns containing alt
rename_column <- function(x){
  library(stringr)
  alt <- x %>% str_extract("^alt[0-9]+\\.")
  if(is.na(alt)){
    # stop here and return x, because it doesn't start with "alt"
    return(x)
  }
  suffix <- x %>% str_replace(pattern = alt, replacement = "")
  number <- alt %>% str_replace_all(pattern = "alt|\\.", "")
  new.name <- paste(suffix, number, sep = "_")
  return(new.name)
}

# Renaming columns
columns <- colnames(iris)
colnames(iris) <- columns %>% map(rename_column)
iris

Hi Kassambara,

You seem to be really on top of how to rename columns and I’m been struggling with writing a code that can rename columns based on their names. I have many different dataset where a number of columns will start with “alt” (e.g. alt1.price, alt1.pol, alt1.x, alt2.price, alt2.pol, alt2.x) and I would like to rename these columns to price_1, pol_1, x_1, price_2, pol_2, x_3.

Essentially, I would like to select columns starting with alt, add an underscore, delete the ‘alt’ and move the number to the end of the column name. Is that possible in any way?

Kind regards, Thomas

Is there a way where I don’t do c(“newname1”, “newname2”, “newname3”, … , “newname200”)?

You can also go as follow:

colnames(my_data) = c("newname1", "newname2", "newname3")