r - Dealing with spaces and "weird" characters in column names with dplyr::rename()

Question

I have table with difficult headers like this:

  Subject  Cat Nbr  Title       Instruction..Mode!
1 XYZ      101      Intro I     ONLINE
2 XYZ      102      Intro II    CAMPUS
3 XYZ      135      Advanced    CAMPUS

I would like to rename the columns with dplyr::rename()

df %>%
 rename(subject = Subject, 
        code = Cat Nbr, 
        title = title, 
        mode = Instruction..Mode!)

But I am getting an Error: unexpected symbol in:

How might I reconcile this?

Answer 1

To refer to variables that contain non-standard characters or start with a number, wrap the name in back ticks, e.g., `Instruction..Mode!`