Is there an efficient way to rename variable with operator in name

May 7, 2022

My data has a bunch of variables with names like ‘day-30’, ‘day-2’ and so on, is there an easier way to convert them to day_30, day_2 and so on at one swoop?

example = data.frame(ID = c(1,1,1,2,2),
                 time0 = c('2009-01-01','2009-01-01','2009-01-01','2005-02-02','2001-01-31'),
                 obs_num = c('A','D','B','B', 'Z'),
                 recorded_dt = c('2009-01-01 ','2009-01-31','2009-01-05','2005-02-03', '2001-01-01'))

example %>% 
  mutate(difs_days = floor(difftime(recorded_dt, time0, units="days"))) %>% 
  arrange(difs_days) %>% 
  pivot_wider(names_from = difs_days, values_from = obs_num, names_prefix = 'day') %>% 
  arrange(ID, recorded_dt)

I want to rename the one that has day-30.

Thanks.

>Solution :

Use rename_with with str_replace_all:

library(stringr)
library(dplyr)

example %>% 
  mutate(difs_days = floor(difftime(recorded_dt, time0, units="days"))) %>% 
  arrange(difs_days) %>% 
  pivot_wider(names_from = difs_days, values_from = obs_num, names_prefix = 'day') %>% 
  arrange(ID, recorded_dt) %>% 
  rename_with(., ~str_replace_all(., '-', '_'))