Convert data frame row to column names

Question

Is there a quick way (part of the tidyverse API perhaps) to turn a row into column names for a data.frame or tibble, somewhat similar to tibble::column_to_rownames?

I realize there are many ways to do this, e.g. somewhat clumsily:

> df <- head(iris)
> 
> df %>%
+     set_colnames(magrittr::extract(., 1,)) %>%
+     magrittr::extract(-1,)
  5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2      1
2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa

Use `header = T` when importing your data. Use `skip` as necessary to make the header the first line. — Gregor Thomas, May 17 '17 at 17:54
In my case, the data isn't being read from file, but that would work if it were — saladi, Jun 04 '17 at 05:44

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered May 17 '17 at 18:00

13

Well, you can simply: colnames(df) <- as.character(df[1, ])

And if you want to remove this first row: df <- df[-1,]

answered May 17 '17 at 18:00

cirofdo

1,074
6
22

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered May 29 '19 at 18:23

janitor::row_to_names() implements this:

library(tidyverse)

iris %>%
  head() %>%
  janitor::row_to_names(1)
#>   5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2      1
#> 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
#> 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
#> 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
#> 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
#> 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa

^{Created on 2019-05-29 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}

Convert data frame row to column names

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