In this article, we will discuss the difference between setNames and setnames methods with examples in R Programming language.

setNames:

setNames is available in stats package, used to name the elements in a vector.

Syntax:

setNames(input_vector, assigned_names) 

where, 

1. input_vector is the vector

2. assigned_names are the names to the elements of input vector.

Example:

In this example, we are going to create a vector with 10 elements and assign the letters as names with setNames() method.

Output:

 a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h  i  j 
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 

setnames:

setnames are available in data.table package used to name the columns in a data frame.

Syntax:

setNames(input_dataframe, c(old_column_name1,…..,old_column_name n),c(new_column_name1,…..,new_column_name n))

where,

1. input_dataframe is the dataframe

2. old_column_name is the old name and new_column_name is the new name

Example:

In this example, we are going to create a dataframe with 3 elements and rename the column names using setnames() method. We specified columns as v1,v2 and v3, now we will rename them to col1, col2, and col3.

Output:

The differences that we observed is 

v1 v2 v3
1  1  6 11
2  2  7 12
3  3  8 13
4  4  9 14
5  5 10 15
  col1 col2 col3
1    1    6   11
2    2    7   12
3    3    8   13
4    4    9   14
5    5   10   15

setnames() is available in data.table() package and setNames() is available in stats package.