Turn row values into column names

Data frames sometimes have wrong column names, while the correct column names are stored in one or more rows in the data frame itself. To remedy this issue, call row_to_colnames() on the data frame: It replaces the column names by the values of the specified rows (by default, only the first one). These rows are then dropped by default.

Usage

row_to_colnames(data, row = 1L, collapse = " ", drop = TRUE)

Arguments

data

Data frame or matrix.

row

Integer. Position of the rows (one or more) that jointly contain the correct column names. Default is 1.

collapse

String. If the length of row is greater than 1, each new column name will be that many row values pasted together. collapse, then, is the substring between two former row values in the final column names. Default is " " (a space).

drop

Logical. If TRUE (the default), the rows specified with row are removed.

Value

A tibble (data frame).

Details

If multiple rows are specified, the row values for each individual column are pasted together. Some special characters might then be missing.

This function might be useful when importing tables from PDF, e.g. with tabulizer. In R, these data frames (converted from matrices) do sometimes have the issue described above.

See also

unheadr::mash_colnames(), a more sophisticated solution to the same problem.