R dplyr: rename variables using string functions

This is a very late answer, on May 2017

As of dplyr 0.5.0.9004, soon to be 0.6.0, many new ways of renaming columns, compliant with the maggritr pipe operator %>%, have been added to the package.

Those functions are:

• rename_all
• rename_if
• rename_at

There are many different ways of using those functions, but the one relevant to your problem, using the stringr package is the following:

df <- df %>%
  rename_all(
      funs(
        stringr::str_to_lower(.) %>%
        stringr::str_replace_all(., '\\.', '_')
      )
  )

And so, carry on with the plumbing :) (no pun intended).

Here's a way around the somewhat awkward rename syntax:

myris <- iris %>% setNames(tolower(gsub("\\.","_",names(.))))

I think you're looking at the documentation for plyr::rename, not dplyr::rename. You would do something like this with dplyr::rename:

iris %>% rename_(.dots=setNames(names(.), tolower(gsub("\\.", "_", names(.)))))