How do I name the "row names" column in r

Question

I'm working with a data frame in r where my row names are meaningful. Hence, I would like to give the column of row names a name. How do I do this?

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to convert the rownames to a proper column of the data.frame. eg:

# add the rownames as a proper column
myDF <- cbind(Row.Names = rownames(myDF), myDF)
myDF

#           Row.Names id val vr2
# row_one     row_one  A   1  23
# row_two     row_two  A   2  24
# row_three row_three  B   3  25
# row_four   row_four  C   4  26

If you want to then remove the original rownames:

rownames(myDF) <- NULL
myDF
#   Row.Names id val vr2
# 1   row_one  A   1  23
# 2   row_two  A   2  24
# 3 row_three  B   3  25
# 4  row_four  C   4  26

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Alternatively, if all of your data is of the same class (ie, all numeric, or all string), you can convert to Matrix and name the dimnames

myMat <- as.matrix(myDF)
names(dimnames(myMat)) <- c("Names.of.Rows", "")
myMat

# Names.of.Rows id  val vr2 
#   row_one   "A" "1" "23"
#   row_two   "A" "2" "24"
#   row_three "B" "3" "25"
#   row_four  "C" "4" "26"