r - what is the difference between names and colnames

Question

I just want to understand if there is a difference between names and colnames when working with data.frame. Both seems to behave the same way. Can I subsitute one by the other?

Answer 1

Are they the same for data.frames? YES

Are they the same in general? Not quite--the big difference is that colnames also works for matrices, whereas names does not (just dataframes).

In addition, you can use names to set/get the names of vectors (and, for obvious reasons, you can't do this with colnames--the result is NULL for getting and an error for setting).