'Trouble with string-replacing in a subset of R columns

I've tried to read through the archives to find a solution but no luck. I want to replace a string ("_" with " ") in a subset of columns in R:

January_2019= c(4, 5)

February_2019= c(1,2)

OtherVariable = c(3,5)

dateColumns <- c("January_2019",
                 "February_2019")

df <- data.frame(January_2019, February_2019, OtherVariable)

colnames(df[dateColumns]) <- gsub("_", " ", colnames(df[dateColumns]))

I cannot figure out why this is not working. What can I try next?

r


Solution 1:[1]

The simplest solution is really this:

names(df) <- gsub("_", " ", names(df))

Result:

df
  January 2019 February 2019 OtherVariable
1            4             1             3
2            5             2             5

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Chris Ruehlemann