R – Get Vector of Dataframe Column Names

A dataframe in R is a data structure used to store tabular data in rows and columns. In this tutorial, we will look at how to get the column names of a dataframe in R as a vector.

How do you get the column names in R?

You can use the colnames() function in R to get the column names of a dataframe. Pass the dataframe as an argument to the function.

The following is the syntax –

colnames(dataframe)

It returns a vector containing the column names of the columns in the dataframe.

Steps to get the column names of an R dataframe

Let’s now look at the steps to follow to get column names of a dataframe

Step 1 – Create a dataframe

First, we will create a dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial.

# create a dataframe
employees_df = data.frame(
  "Name"= c("Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi", "Kevin"),
  "Age"= c(26, 28, 29, 32, 30),
  "Department"= c("Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR", "Accounting")
)
# display the dataframe
print(employees_df)

Output:

    Name Age Department
1    Jim  26      Sales
2 Dwight  28      Sales
3 Angela  29 Accounting
4   Tobi  32         HR
5  Kevin  30 Accounting

We now have a dataframe containing information about some employees working in an office. The dataframe has columns “Name”, “Age”, and “Department”.

Step 2 – Get the column names in the dataframe using colnames() function

Pass the dataframe as an argument to the colnames() function to get the dataframe’s column names.

Let’s get the column names of the dataframe created above.

# get column names in the dataframe as vector
col_names <- colnames(employees_df)
# display the resulting vector
print(col_names)

Output:

[1] "Name"       "Age"        "Department"

We get a vector with the column names in the above dataframe.

You might also be interested in –

• Create a DataFrame in R
• How to Add a Row to a Dataframe in R?
• How to Add a Column to a Dataframe in R?