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rdataframetibble

Adding descriptive text to column names

I recently loaded in some data from a world bank API and when I viewed the dataframe with tibble's view() function, I noticed some nice descriptive metadata text just below the column name, like in the image below

screenshot of the panel

I would like to be able to reproduce this effect in the future, attributes(mtcars)$subheaders <- c("where","are","my","subheaders") did not work for me and I appear to lack the proper technical vocabulary to be able to search for the solution.

Solution

  • You can put all kinds of information in the attributes. Some packages add labels and extra information to factor vectors for instance.

    df <- data.frame(a = 10)
attr(df$a, "subheader") <- "description of a"
 
>attr(df$a, "subheader")
[1] "description of a"
> 
> str(df)
'data.frame':   1 obs. of  1 variable:
 $ a: num 10
  ..- attr(*, "subheader")= chr "description of a"

    and you can add a function to get the subheader

    subheader <- function(vec) {
  attr(vec, "subheader")
}
  
subheader(df$a)

    EDIT

    To have the description show up in View() you can add label as the name of the attribute.

    df <- data.frame(a = 10)
attr(df$a, "label") <- "description of a"