names

R Base 3.6.2

Functions to get or set the names of an object.

Syntax

names(x)
names(x) &lt;- value

Arguments

Parameter	Description
`x`	an R object.
`value`	a character vector of up to the same length as x, or NULL.

Return Value

For names, NULL or a character vector of the same length as x. (NULL is given if the object has no names, including for objects of types which cannot have names.) For an environment, the length is the number of objects in the environment but the order of the names is arbitrary. For names<-, the updated object. (Note that the value of names(x) <- value is that of the assignment, value, not the return value from the left-hand side.)

Details

names is a generic accessor function, and names<- is a generic replacement function. The default methods get and set the "names" attribute of a vector (including a list) or pairlist. For an environment env, names(env) gives the names of the corresponding list, i.e., names(as.list(env, all.names = TRUE)) which are also given by ls(env, all.names = TRUE, sorted = FALSE). If the environment is used as a hash table, names(env) are its “keys”. If value is shorter than x, it is extended by character NAs to the length of x. It is possible to update just part of the names attribute via the general rules: see the examples. This works because the expression there is evaluated as z <- "names<-"(z, "[<-"(names(z), 3, "c2")). The name "" is special: it is used to indicate that there is no name associat

Examples

Example

# NOT RUN {
# print the names attribute of the islands data set
names(islands)

# remove the names attribute
names(islands) <- NULL
islands
rm(islands) # remove the copy made

z <- list(a = 1, b = "c", c = 1:3)
names(z)
# change just the name of the third element.
names(z)[3] <- "c2"
z

z <- 1:3
names(z)
## assign just one name
names(z)[2] <- "b"
z

# }