How can I access column names of an intermediate step in a pipeline

Question

I'd like to change a column name in an intermediate step of a pipeline. Seems like I'm missing something simple.

I can do this:

library(dplyr)
library(purrr)

temp <- starwars[1:5,1:5]
temp <- set_names(temp,c("person",names(temp)[-1]))

This is what I want:

temp
#> # A tibble: 5 × 5
#>   person         height  mass hair_color skin_color 
#>   <chr>           <int> <dbl> <chr>      <chr>      
#> 1 Luke Skywalker    172    77 blond      fair       
#> 2 C-3PO             167    75 <NA>       gold       
#> 3 R2-D2              96    32 <NA>       white, blue
#> 4 Darth Vader       202   136 none       white      
#> 5 Leia Organa       150    49 brown      light

But I can't do this:

temp <- starwars[1:5,1:5] |> 
  set_names(c("person",names(~.)[-1]))
temp
#> # A tibble: 5 × 5
#>   person         person person person person     
#>   <chr>           <int>  <dbl> <chr>  <chr>      
#> 1 Luke Skywalker    172     77 blond  fair       
#> 2 C-3PO             167     75 <NA>   gold       
#> 3 R2-D2              96     32 <NA>   white, blue
#> 4 Darth Vader       202    136 none   white      
#> 5 Leia Organa       150     49 brown  light

Created on 2024-02-13 with reprex v2.1.0

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have already attached the dplyr package so is there any reason rename_with wouldn't work?

starwars[1:5,1:5] |>
  rename_with(~ "Person", .cols = 1)

You can specify any tidy-select helper to pick the column. Here I selected the column by index.