Question

Trying to create a data.frame like this:

a = "foo"
bar = data.frame(a = 1:3)

But the name of the column is a, not foo:

> bar
  a
1 1
2 2
3 3

The column can be renamed after creating data.frame, but how to easily assign it’s name by a variable just in the same data.frame command?

Answer 1

The setNames() function should work for you:

a <- "Numbers"
b <- "Letters"

bar <- setNames(data.frame(1:3, letters[1:3]), c(a, b))
bar
#   Numbers Letters
# 1       1       a
# 2       2       b
# 3       3       c