make.names {base}R Documentation

Make Legal R Names Out of Strings

Description

Make legal R names out of every names[i] string. Invalid characters are translated to ".".

Usage

make.names(names, unique=FALSE)

Arguments

names character (vector) to be coerced to proper names.
unique logical; if TRUE, the resulting strings are unique. This may be desired for, e.g., column names.

Value

character vector of same length as names with each changed to a legal name.

See Also

names,character,data.frame

Examples

make.names(c("a and b", "a_and_b"), unique=TRUE)#-> "a.and.b"  "a.and.b1"

all(make.names(letters) == letters)# TRUE

data(state)
state.name[make.names(state.name) != state.name]# those 10 with a space
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