[R] column name handling and long labels

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Werner Wernersen
<pensterfuzzer at yahoo.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have two loosely related questions which could make
> my live again a bit easier:
>
> 1) Is there a simple way to select a range of columns
> in a data frame using column names?
> I am thinking of something like mydf[1,"col4":"col8"]

Try this using builtin data frame anscombe which has columns
x1 to x4 followed by y1 to y4:

subset(anscombe, select = x3:y2)

>
> 2) I have a data frame with many columns and they all
> have short variable names which is good in most cases
> but sometimes it would be nice to have also a longer
> descriptive name / label attached to the variable
> which could then be used for printing and latex
> output. Has anybody come up with a convenient way to
> do that?
> Right now, I am using always match or merge in case of
> row names.
>

See ?label in package Hmisc.

> Many thanks,
>  Werner