what is the difference between names and colnames

r dataframe names
Manu H picture Manu H · Jul 17, 2014 · Viewed 11.2k times · Source

I just want to understand if there is a difference between names and colnames when working with data.frame. Both seems to behave the same way. Can I subsitute one by the other?

Answer

Steve S picture Steve S · Jul 17, 2014

Are they the same for data.frames? YES

Are they the same in general? Not quite--the big difference is that colnames also works for matrices, whereas names does not (just dataframes).

In addition, you can use names to set/get the names of vectors (and, for obvious reasons, you can't do this with colnames--the result is NULL for getting and an error for setting).

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