Add label with names of the variables using expss - r

Question

I have a data frame with 383 variables. Because the names of the variables are long and self-explanatory, I would like to add these names to the labels of variables, then in a second step (already successfully done), I would rename variables for easier coding. I have tried the following with the error:
library(expss)
REGCON_CA_FIRM <- apply_labels(REGCON_CA_FIRM,names(REGCON_CA_FIRM)<-names(REGCON_CA_FIRM))
# Error in if (curr_name %in% data_names) { : argument is of length zero

Answer 1

A one-liner using mtcars:
do.call(apply_labels, c(list(data=mtcars),setNames(names(mtcars), names(mtcars)) %>% as.list()))
However, for your use case, you can create a small function as below that takes a dataframe and a vector of new names, and basically moves the current column names to labels, and replaces the original (i.e. too long) names with the new names
replace_long_with_short <- function(d,short_names) {
setNames(
do.call(apply_labels, c(list(data=d),setNames(names(df), names(df)) %>% as.list())),
short_names
)
}
Pass your dataframe to this function, along with desired new names. The function will return the frame with the original column names as labels, and the new colnames will be the desired new names:
Example: Let's say you have a data frame that looks like this:
X.is.an.important.variable Y.is.also.important
1 -0.003643385 1.1052905
2 1.641458152 0.5303247
3 -1.058337452 0.5490569
and you want those descriptive column names to be the labels, and the new names to be x and y.
Then calling the above function like this:
df = replace_long_with_short(df,c("x", "y"))
will convert df to this:
x y
1 -0.003643385 1.1052905
2 1.641458152 0.5303247
3 -1.058337452 0.5490569
and the labels will be attached:
str(df)
'data.frame': 3 obs. of 2 variables:
$ x:Class 'labelled' num -0.00364 1.64146 -1.05834
.. .. LABEL: X.is.an.important.variable
$ y:Class 'labelled' num 1.105 0.53 0.549
.. .. LABEL: Y.is.also.important