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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://scottishsnow.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/r-colnames-spatial-dataframe/"> R – scottishsnow</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>Ordnance Survey have a great <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/os-open-roads.html">OpenRoads dataset</a>, but unfortunately it contains a column called ‘primary’, which is a <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sqlite.org/lang_keywords.html">keyword in SQL</a>. This makes it challenging/impossible to import the OpenRoads dataset into a SQL database (e.g. GRASS), without changing the offending column name.</p>
<p>Enter R! Or any other capable programming language. The following script reads a folder of shp files, changes a given column name and overwrites the original files. Note the use of the ‘@’ symbol to call a slot from the S4 class object (<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/87806/23160">thanks Stack Exchange</a>).</p>
<pre>
library(rgdal)

f = list.files(&quot;~/Downloads/OS/data&quot;, pattern=&quot;shp&quot;)

f = substr(f, 1, nchar(f) - 4)

lapply(f, function(i){

x = readOGR(&quot;/home/mspencer/Downloads/OS/data&quot;, i)

colnames(x@data)[11] = &quot;prim&quot;

writeOGR(x,
&quot;/home/mspencer/Downloads/OS/data&quot;,
i,
&quot;ESRI Shapefile&quot;,
overwrite_layer=T)

})
</pre>
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