Standardise Column Names in a Data Frame — clean

This function takes a data frame and standardises its column names by converting them to lower case, replacing special characters with underscores, and ensuring that names are syntactically valid R names.

Usage

clean_names(dat)

Arguments

dat: A data frame whose column names need to be standardized.

Value

A data frame with standardised column names. All column names are converted to lower case, special characters are replaced with underscores, and redundant underscores at the end of names are removed.

Examples

# Create a data frame with various column names
dat <- data.frame("NAmE1" = 1:3, "name-2" = 4:6, "nAMe.-72" = 7:9)

# Clean the column names
cleaned_dat <- clean_names(dat)
#> Loading required package: tidyverse
#> ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
#> ✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
#> ✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
#> ✔ ggplot2   3.5.1     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
#> ✔ lubridate 1.9.3     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
#> ✔ purrr     1.0.2     
#> ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
#> ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
#> ✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
#> ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

# Check the result
print(cleaned_dat)
#>   name1 name_2 name_72
#> 1     1      4       7
#> 2     2      5       8
#> 3     3      6       9