Renaming Columns in R According to Repeating Sequence

I have a wide data frame in R and I am trying to rename the column names so that I can reshape it to a long format.

Currently, the data is structured like this:

long lat V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 ... V477

I'd like to rename the columns so that they are:

long lat Jan_1979 Feb_1979 Mar_1979 Apr_1979 ... Sept_2018

I'm not sure how to go about doing this. Any help would be appreciated.

Solution

There are multiple ways you could do this.

One way in base R is by using seq to create monthly dates in the format you need. So for example, you could create first 10 sequence starting from 1979-01-01 by

format(seq(as.Date('1979-01-01'), length.out = 10, by = "1 month"), "%b_%Y")

#[1] "Jan_1979" "Feb_1979" "Mar_1979" "Apr_1979" "May_1979" "Jun_1979" "Jul_1979"
#[8] "Aug_1979" "Sep_1979" "Oct_1979"

For your case, this should work

names(df)[3:479] <- format(seq(as.Date('1979-01-01'), 
                           length.out = 477, by = "1 month"), "%b_%Y")