[R] question regarding names() value assignment

[Thomas Lumley]

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Alex Buerkle wrote:

> 
> I am having trouble assigning a name to single columns in a dataframe.
> The following is an example using 0.64.1 and linux.
> 
> tmp is a dataframe.
> 
> > names(tmp)
> [1] "some"  "thing"
> 
> > names(tmp)<-c("else","again")
> 
> > names(tmp)
> [1] "else"  "again"
> 
> > names(tmp[2])
> [1] "again"
> 
> > names(tmp[2])<-"altogether"
> 
> > names(tmp[2])
> [1] "again"
> 
> Can anyone explain this behavior to me?

tmp[2] is a copy of the second column of tmp. You change the name on this
copy, which is then discarded. 

You mean 

	names(tmp)[2]<-"again"


Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._