R colnames() assigning every element in list to first column

Question

I am trying to rename the 104 columns in a dataframe (df) using a list or character vector (I've tried it both ways).

Instead of assigning the 104 elements in the vector or list to the 104 columns one each, it assigns all 104 elements to the first column, and all others get NA.

Any suggestions as to why this behavior and how to do it correctly?

> names(df)


 [1] "V1"   "V2"   "V3"   "V4"   "V5"   "V6"   "V7"   "V8"   "V9"   "V10"  "V11"  "V12"  "V13"  "V14"  "V15"  "V16"  "V17"  "V18"  "V19"  "V20"  "V21"  "V22"  "V23"  "V24"  "V25"  "V26"  "V27" 
 [28] "V28"  "V29"  "V30"  "V31"  "V32"  "V33"  "V34"  "V35"  "V36"  "V37"  "V38"  "V39"  "V40"  "V41"  "V42"  "V43"  "V44"  "V45"  "V46"  "V47"  "V48"  "V49"  "V50"  "V51"  "V52"  "V53"  "V54" 
 [55] "V55"  "V56"  "V57"  "V58"  "V59"  "V60"  "V61"  "V62"  "V63"  "V64"  "V65"  "V66"  "V67"  "V68"  "V69"  "V70"  "V71"  "V72"  "V73"  "V74"  "V75"  "V76"  "V77"  "V78"  "V79"  "V80"  "V81" 
 [82] "V82"  "V83"  "V84"  "V85"  "V86"  "V87"  "V88"  "V89"  "V90"  "V91"  "V92"  "V93"  "V94"  "V95"  "V96"  "V97"  "V98"  "V99"  "V100" "V101" "V102" "V103" "V104"

> d2 = as.character(strapply(name,"(?<=[0-9]{1}=)(.{2,}?)((?= V[0-9])|(?=   $))",perl=TRUE))
> d2
[1] "c(\"ICPSR MEMBER ID NUMBER\", \"CONGRESS\", \"CHAMBER/CLASS\", \"STATE\", \"DISTRICT\", \"PARTY\", \"POL PARTY\", \"FULL NAME\", \"SEX\", \"REGION\", \"STATE BORN ..... \"ICPSR STUDY NUMBER\", \"ICPSR VERSION NUMBER\", \"ICPSR PART NUMBER\")"

 > class(d2)
 [1] "character"
 > colnames(df2) = d2
 > head(df2,1)


 c("ICPSR MEMBER ID NUMBER", "CONGRESS", "CHAMBER/CLASS", "STATE", "DISTRICT", "PARTY", "POL PARTY", "FULL NAME", "SEX", "REGION", "STATE BORN (ICPSR CODE)", "BORN/REP SAME STATE", "BORN/REP SAME REGION", "ICPSR RELATIVES CODE", "RELATIVES CLLPS", "SE ...
    1 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             1
  NA NA NA NA  NA NA                        NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA  NA  NA NA NA NA NA  NA  NA NA NA

Answer 1

Create a vector of labels and then assign it to the data frame, no need for as.character.

labels <- c("ICPSR MEMBER ID NUMBER", "CONGRESS")
colnames(df) <- labels