use first row data as column names in r

Question

I have a dirty dataset that I could not read it with header = T. After I read and clean it, I would like to use the now first row data as the column name. I tried multiple methods on Stack Overflow without success. What could be the problem?

The dataset t1 should look like this after clean up:

      V1    V2  V3  V4  V5
1   col1    col2    col3    col4
2   row1    2   4   5   56
3   row2    74  74  3   534
4   row3    865 768 8   7
5   row4    68  86  65  87

• I tried: colnames(t1) <- t1[1,]. Nothing happens.

• I tried: names(t1) <- ti[1,], Nothing happens.

• I tried: lapply(t1, function(x) {names(x) <- x[1, ]; x}). It returns an error message:

  Error in `[.default`(x, 1, ) : incorrect number of dimensions
  

Could anyone help?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32054368/use-first-row-data-as-column-names-in-r

Answer 1

Sam Firke's ever useful package janitor has a function especially for this: row_to_names.

Example from his documentation:

library(janitor)

x <- data.frame(X_1 = c(NA, "Title", 1:3),
           X_2 = c(NA, "Title2", 4:6))
x %>%
  row_to_names(row_number = 2)