Turn row values into variable labels

April 13, 2023

I have a messy dataset that is like this:

Q1 <- "Age"
Q2 <- "Sex"
Q3 <- "Age"
Q4 <- "Race"
df <- data.frame(Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4)

How do I turn every value of row 1 into variable label?
i.e: into something like this:

library(labelled)
var_label(df$Q1) <- "Age"
var_label(df$Q2) <- "Sex"
var_label(df$Q3) <- "Age"
var_label(df$Q4) <- "Race"

I have a large dataset with many variables. Is there a faster and efficient way to do this? How do I turn every value of row 1 into variable label?

I would appreciate all the help there is! Thanks!!!

>Solution :

The var_label can take a vector of data.frame as input, so, we can use

var_label(df) <- df[1, , drop = FALSE]

-output

> str(df)
'data.frame':   1 obs. of  4 variables:
 $ Q1: chr "Age"
  ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "Age"
 $ Q2: chr "Sex"
  ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "Sex"
 $ Q3: chr "Age"
  ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "Age"
 $ Q4: chr "Race"
  ..- attr(*, "label")= chr "Race"