is it possible to name the first unnamed automated generated column in a data.frame? as you can see with the following code, i replaced the very first automated generated column with my first column.
if not, how can i access the data there? thank you
df<-data.frame(column1=letters[1:5], column2=1:5, column3=LETTERS[1:5])
rownames(df) <- df[,1]
df[,1] <- NULL
These are the row names of the data frame. They aren’t actually a column at all: they are a vector of values stored separately as an attribute of the object. They also have to follow specific rules (there can’t be any duplicated values) and — fair warning — they do not always behave the way people expect. As an attribute, there is no way to give them a name (other than their built-in name of row.names).
Usually when people want to name the row names, it’s because they are working with a data frame that already has meaningful row names. The usual advice is to convert the row names into a proper column. But you seem to be trying to move data from a proper column into the row names, so I think it will help if you can explain more of the bigger picture of what you’re trying to do?
The base documentation for row names in data frames: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/row.names.html
A deep dive into the (sometimes unexpected) behavior of row names in data frames: https://www.perfectlyrandom.org/2015/06/16/never-trust-the-row-names-of-a-dataframe-in-R/
A briefer argument against using row names in data frames:
https://adv-r.hadley.nz/vectors-chap.html#rownames
A useful explanation of the difference between the row.names() and rownames() functions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38466276/why-is-row-names-preferred-over-rownames
thank you for your reply, which already answered my question. i solved the problem with you're advice to convert the row names into a proper column, then i could give them the name i had to.