Set old names as labels in clean_names

[jospueyo]

Today I engaged in this thread in mastodon who led me to read this blog about data labels in R. I thought that would be nice that clean_names() had the option to keep the old names as labels in the dataframe.

I think that would not be too complicated. I'm keen to propose a PR if I you were willing to accept the feature. It would be something like this...

if (set_labels){
    old_names <- names(dat)
    purrr::walk(1:ncol(dat), \(i) attr(dat[[i]], "label") <<- old_names[[i]])
}

names(dat) <- make_clean_names(names(dat))

 

If you don't like using superassignment, this can also be done in a for loop.

[billdenney]

@jospueyo , thanks for your interest in the package. And, I understand the value of keeping the original name associated with the column.

I like that it seems you would make including the labels as optional with the set_labels argument. I also like that you accurately predicted that I would not like super-assignment. 😄

So, I think that PR could be useful. As with any PR:

• Please make the default backwards compatible (so set_labels would be FALSE. I, too, have had issues with labels messing things up in the past, as mentioned on the Mastodon thread.
• Please be sure to test for the changes
• please add it to the News file
• please add yourself as a contributor

[sfirke]

Sounds good to me too. After this is introduced I could see having tabyl() use labels where available, but that's unrelated (in code at least) to this suggestion.

[sfirke]

Looking at that Masto thread, some people talk about wanting to restore the original names at some point. Do we know if there's a function in another labelling package that transfers the labels into the column names? Kind of undoing the clean_names call.

It seems like a potentially simple function, but (a) I hope someone else already wrote a good version we can point to (b) I don't want to overcomplicate things and there would be some thinking needed around say, what if only some of the original columns are present.

[billdenney]

Something like dirty_names()? 🤣 (I don't know if it already exists.)

My experience with attributes like this is that they're lost easily. Creating a reverse function (like dirty_names() or likely better label_to_names()) would likely end with a lot of questions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't create it, but we should have some very good documentation before including it in janitor.

[sfirke]

Looks to me like sjlabelled::label_to_colnames might do it, what do you think?

[billdenney]

@sfirke, that looks like the right solution to me. We should refer to it in the documentation.