r - How to deal with spaces in column names?

Question

I know it is preferred if variable names do not have spaces in them. I have a situation where I need publication-quality charts, so axes and legends need to have properly formatted labels, ie with spaces. So, for example, in development I might have variables called "Pct.On.OAC" and Age.Group, but in my final plot I need "% on OAC" and "Age Group" to appear:

'data.frame':   22 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ % on OAC           : Factor w/ 11 levels "0","0.1-9.9",..: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
 $ Age Group          : Factor w/ 2 levels "Aged 80 and over",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
 $ Number of Practices: int  47 5 33 98 287 543 516 222 67 14 ...

But when I try to plot these:

ggplot(dt.m, aes(x=`% on OAC`,y=`Number of Practices`, fill=`Age Group`)) +
    geom_bar()
)

no problem with that. But when I add a facet:

ggplot(dt.m, aes(x=`% on OAC`,y=`Number of Practices`, fill=`Age Group`)) +
    geom_bar() +
    facet_grid(`Age Group`~ .) 

I get Error in[.data.frame(base, names(rows)) : undefined columns selected

If I change Age Group to Age.Group then it works fine, but as I said, I don't want the dot to appear in the title legend.

So my questions are:

1. Is there a workaround for the problem with the facet ?
2. Is there a better general approach to dealing with the problem of spaces (and other characters) in variable names when I want the final plot to include them ? I suppose I can manually overide them, but that seems like a lot of faffing around.

Answer 1

You asked "Is there a better general approach to dealing with the problem of spaces (and other characters) in variable names" and yes there are a few:

• Just don't use them as things will break as you experienced here
• Use the make.names() function to create safe names; this is used by R too to create identifiers (eg by using underscores for spaces etc)
• If you must, protect the unsafe identifiers with backticks.

Example for the last two points:

R> myvec <- list("foo"=3.14, "some bar"=2.22)
R> myvec$'some bar' * 2
[1] 4.44
R> make.names(names(myvec))
[1] "foo"      "some.bar"
R>