Changing column names using regular expressions

Question

I have five columns named organoleptic.1., organoleptic.2., organoleptic.3. and so forth in a data frame called "df". I want to rename them to organoleptic1, organoleptic2, organoleptic3, etc. That is, I want to remove the two dots surrounding the number. I did it using the names function:

names(df)[names(df) == "organoleptic.1."] <- "organoleptic1"
names(df)[names(df) == "organoleptic.2."] <- "organoleptic2"
names(df)[names(df) == "organoleptic.3."] <- "organoleptic3"
names(df)[names(df) == "organoleptic.4."] <- "organoleptic4"
names(df)[names(df) == "organoleptic.5."] <- "organoleptic5"

However, I would like to do it just typing one line of code. Is it possible to do that using regular expressions or any other trick? Many thx!

Answer 1

We can try by using gsub function. Edit: Fixed from sub to gsub

colnames(df) <- gsub('.', '', colnames(df), fixed=TRUE)