R: Dimnames of an Object

dimnames {base}

R Documentation

Dimnames of an Object

Description

Retrieve or set the dimnames of an object.

Usage

dimnames(x)
dimnames(x) <- nlist

Arguments

x

an R object, for example a matrix, array or data frame.

nlist

a list of the length dim(x) whose components are either null or character vectors the length of the appropriate dimension of x.

Details

The functions dimnames and dimnames<- are generic.

For an array (and hence in particular, for a matrix), they retrieve or set the dimnames attribute (see attributes) of the object. The list nlist can have names, and these will be used to label the dimensions of the array where appropriate.

Both have methods for data frames. The dimnames of a data frame are its row.names attribute and its names.

Examples

## simple versions of rownames and colnames
## could be defined as follows
rownames0 <- function(x) dimnames(x)[[1]]
colnames0 <- function(x) dimnames(x)[[2]]