Replacing column with another data frame based on name matching

Hi I am a bit new so I am not sure if I am doing this right, but I looked around on the overflow and couldn’t find a code or advice that worked with my code.

I have a dataframe mainDF that looks like this:

I have another dataframe, TranslateDF that has the converting info for the abbreviated column names. And I want to replace the abbreviated names with the real names here:

Do note that the translating data frame may have extraneous info or it could be missing info for the column, and so if the mainDF does not get the full naming, for it to be dropped from the data.

Ideally, I would get the new resulted dataframe as:

I would appreciate any help on this thank you!

>Solution :

You can pass a named vector to select() which will rename and select in one step. Wrapping with any_of() ensures it won’t fail if any columns don’t exist in the main data frame:

library(dplyr)

df1 %>%
  select(Person, any_of(setNames(df2$Abbreviated, df2$Full_Naming))) 

# A tibble: 3 x 6
  Person `All barbecue grill` `shake eel peel` `cold loin cake` `xylophone spear pint` `apple pot pie`
  <chr>                 <dbl>            <dbl>            <dbl>                  <dbl>           <dbl>
1 SP-1                    2.1              3                1.3                    1.8             1.4
2 SP-2                    2.5              2.1              2                      1.9             1.2
3 SP-3                    2.3              3.1              2.5                    1.5             1.1

Data:

df1 <- structure(list(Person = c("SP-1", "SP-2", "SP-3"), ABG = c(2.1, 
2.5, 2.3), SEP = c(3, 2.1, 3.1), CLC = c(1.3, 2, 2.5), XSP = c(1.8, 
1.9, 1.5), APP = c(1.4, 1.2, 1.1), WED = c(2.5, 1.2, 2.6), GSH = c(1.4, 
2.1, 2.1)), class = c("spec_tbl_df", "tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"
), row.names = c(NA, -3L), spec = structure(list(cols = list(
    Person = structure(list(), class = c("collector_character", 
    "collector")), ABG = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), SEP = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), CLC = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), XSP = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), APP = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), WED = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector")), GSH = structure(list(), class = c("collector_double", 
    "collector"))), default = structure(list(), class = c("collector_guess", 
"collector")), skip = 1L), class = "col_spec"))

df2 <- structure(list(Abbreviated = c("ABG", "SEP", "CLC", "XSP", "APP", 
"HUM", "LPL"), Full_Naming = c("All barbecue grill", "shake eel peel", 
"cold loin cake", "xylophone spear pint", "apple pot pie", "hall united meat", 
"lending porkloin")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-7L))