Delete part of column name for multiple columns

Question

I am cleaning my data in a tibble format with tidyverse. I want to get rid of prefix in column names which were assigned by system, eg:

x <- c("XYZ.date", "XYZ.region", "XYZ.region.europe.western"). 

There are not many distinct prefixes, BUT they are not always the same length.I know I can rename them one by one with rename function, but is there a way to get rid of them all at once?

It is not a problem to do a list of them.

Answer 1

foo <- function(x) gsub("^[^_]*_", "", x)

df %>%
    rename_all(foo)

So, here I write a function that says remove everything from a string up to the underscore ("_") and then apply this function to all the names.

Answer 2

This replaces each occurrence of all characters up to and including underscore with the empty string and then makes the result unique. We can optionally remove %>% make.unique in the first case or %>% as_tibble(.name_repair = "unique") in the second case if it is known that the names will be unique anyways.

library(dplyr)
DF %>% rename_all(~ sub(".*_", "", .x) %>% make.unique)

or this which disambiguates the names in a slightly different manner.

library(dplyr)
library(tibble)
DF %>% rename_all(~ sub(".*_", "", .x)) %>% as_tibble(.name_repair = "unique")

Example

For example, using the first case above add prefixes to each name of the built in anscombe creating DF and apply the above to that in the last line of code below.

# set up a test data frame using builtin anscombe
DF <- setNames(anscombe, sub("(.)(.)", "\\1_\\2", names(anscombe)))
names(DF)
## [1] "x_1" "x_2" "x_3" "x_4" "y_1" "y_2" "y_3" "y_4"

DF %>% rename_all(~ sub(".*_", "", .x) %>% make.unique)
##     1  2  3  4   1.1  2.1   3.1   4.1
## 1  10 10 10  8  8.04 9.14  7.46  6.58
## 2   8  8  8  8  6.95 8.14  6.77  5.76
## ...etc...

Answer 3

In base R, replacing a 3 character alphanumeric prefix followed by an underscore:

colnames(df) <- gsub("^[0-9A-Za-z]{3}_", "", colnames(df))

Answer 4

You can use the following code to do it

df <- cbind(1,1:4)
colnames(df) <- c("x","Y")
colnames(df) <- paste("Sub", colnames(df), sep = "_")
df
#>      Sub_x Sub_Y
#> [1,]     1     1
#> [2,]     1     2
#> [3,]     1     3
#> [4,]     1     4
colnames(df)<-sub("^[^_]*_","",colnames(df))
df
#>      x Y
#> [1,] 1 1
#> [2,] 1 2
#> [3,] 1 3
#> [4,] 1 4

^{Created on 2020-01-29 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}